Pilots of an American Airlines flight got a bit of a shock over the weekend when they seemed to encounter a UFO flying above them.
A radio transmission picked up by Steve Douglass, a photojournalist and investigative reporter who works with CBS News, CNN and the ABC in the US, revealed the pilot’s discovery.
“We just had something go right over the top of us – I hate to say this, but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing – moving really fast right over the top of us,” the pilot said in the recording.
The flight in question, 2292, was headed from Cincinnati to Phoenix on Sunday afternoon. Douglass used flight monitoring websites to pinpoint its location at the time of the recording to the “northeast corner of New Mexico, west of Clayton”.
The recording and Douglass’ observations were published on aviation, space and military intelligence blog Deep Black Horizon.
At the time, American Airlines told Douglass they did “not have any indication the radio transmission was from the flight crew on board American Airlines Flight 2292 on Feb 21”.
However, the airline told Travel Weekly in a statement that after debriefing with the flight crew, they can now confirm the transmission was from flight 2292.
When asked if it could reveal what the “long cylindrical object” was, the airline directed Travel Weekly to reach out to the FBI.
While we have not yet heard back from the FBI, Travel Weekly’s office is abuzz with wild speculation that aliens are walking among us.
Of course, unidentified flying object doesn’t always mean aliens, but the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US told Forbes in a statement that air traffic controllers were not aware of any objects in the area at the time.
It is worth noting that New Mexico is home to a missile range known as White Sands, but its chief of public affairs, Scott Stearns, told Fox News that the range was not testing any missiles on that day.
“We have no idea what it could have been or if anything similar has been sighted in that area before,” he said.
This isn’t the first time an airline pilot has had a potential extraterrestrial encounter, with multiple pilots reporting a UFO zooming over Ireland in November 2018 and this footage from 2016 showing what looks like a UFO chasing a jet.
We don’t know about you, but we see this as proof enough to start constructing tinfoil hats and heading for the hills.
Image: iStock/Fabian Gysel
