A fighter pilot saw a “football sized” cylindrical UFO fly past his plane during a secret mission, according to a leaked audio recording.
The stunned US airman, identified only as Troy 21, could be heard saying that the “dark grey cylindrical object” flew just “10ft” under his wing. He was piloting a Beechcraft 350 C plane on a Homeland Security mission to surveil drug-related activity when the incident unfolded near Los Angeles, California, on September 17, 2024.
He shared his sighting with local air traffic controllers, calling it “weird”, and then ordered an officer onboard his radar-equipped plane to investigate. A short while later, he said his team had picked up the object around “60 miles away”. Another air traffic controller was then heard on the recording admitting, “There was some UFO reported”. But she then added: “That’s all taken care of now.”
The pilot said: “This is going to sound weird. But I just had something pass underneath my wing. Maybe a football-sized object right under my wing.” He’s then asked if he thought it was a drone but replies: “I have no idea, I’ve got my best operator looking for it on the camera right now. We’ll see if we can find it… It was like a dark grey cylindrical object, and it was probably the size of a football, and it passed maybe 10 feet under our right wing.”
When the pilot later says he is tracking the craft 60 miles away, an air traffic controller is heard saying: “We were busy, there was some UFO, but that’s all taken care of now, so you don’t have to worry about it.” Ben Hansen, host of the Discovery+ show ‘UFO Witness’, where the footage is being examined, told News Nation the object could not have been a drone due to the speed at which it was flying. He said based on his analysis, it would have exceeded Mac 2 in two minutes.
The sighting comes after the Pentagon’s latest report on UFOs, which revealed hundreds of new sightings of unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena. However, it said there were no indications that any of these were extraterrestrial in origin. The review, published in November last year, includes hundreds of cases of misidentified balloons, birds and satellites as well as some that defy easy explanation, such as a near-miss between a commercial airliner and a mysterious object off the coast of New York.
While it isn’t likely to settle any debates over the existence of alien life, the report reflects heightened public interest in the topic and the government’s efforts to provide some answers. Its publication came a day after House lawmakers called for greater government transparency during a hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — the government’s term for UFOs.
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