‘It’s a UFO!’ 2 separate pilots report encounter with mysterious flying object over Arizona.
“Was anybody above us that passed us like 30 seconds ago?” the Phoenix New Times quotes the pilot of a Learjet flying toward California as asking air traffic controllers around 3:30pm Feb. 24. When officials at the FAA’s Albuquerque Center say no, the pilot responds, “OK. Something did.” Minutes later, an official asks the pilot of an American Airlines Airbus in the area to “let me know if you see anything pass over you here in the next 15 miles.” The pilot was initially confused—”Over us?”—but later relayed, “Yeah, something just passed over us. Uh, like a—I don’t know what it was, but it was at least two-three thousand feet above us. Yeah, it passed right over the top of us.”
The Airbus pilot couldn’t tell if the UFO was in motion or hovering in place but said it had a “big reflection” and “wasn’t an airplane,” KOB 4 reports. It would have been about 40,000 feet above the desert below. The FAA, which released the flight-control recording, didn’t see anything on its radar, couldn’t verify the presence of any other aircraft, and still doesn’t know what the mysterious object was. It says it probably wasn’t a weather balloon, military craft, or “Google balloon.” “We have a close working relationship with a number of other agencies and safely handle military aircraft and civilian aircraft of all types in that area every day,” says Lynn Lunsford at the FAA. According to CNN, joking references to UFOs can be heard on the FAA recording. (The Pentagon never admitted having a secret UFO program.
