A US Air Force pilot on a secret flight reported a “football-sized,” cylindrical UFO closely passing by his jet in California last September, according to newly leaked audio.
The experienced pilot flying a Beechcraft 350 C through controlled airspace on Sept. 17 reported a close encounter with the unidentified object on a clear afternoon above California, according to a recording of his call with air traffic control obtained NewsNation’s “Banfield”.
“This is going to sound weird,” the pilot identified as “Troy 21” tells a local air traffic controller in Los Angeles at 2:30 p.m. “But I just had something pass underneath my wing. Maybe a football-sized object right under my wing.”
The pilot was on an undisclosed military-related flight involving the Department of Homeland Security, the outlet reported.
The air traffic controller asked if the pilot believed the flying object was a drone, to which the pilot, flying at 20,000 feet, responded he was unsure. Experts told NewsNation that some military and hobbyist drones can reach altitudes that high, though those types of drones are uncommon.
“I’ve got my sensor operator looking for it on the camera right now, we’ll see if we can find it,” Troy 21 said.
“But it was like a dark gray, cylindrical object and it was probably the size of a football and it passed maybe 10 feet under our right wing,” the pilot said.
Roughly one minute later, the airman reported seeing an object on the jet’s air-to-air. About 40 seconds after that, he reported seeing an object on radar 60 miles away — but it’s unclear if it was the one that passed under the plane’s wing.
For the objects to be one and the same, the UFO would need to be traveling at over Mach 2 speed to cover the distance in that short amount of time.
Later in the leaked recording, a different air traffic controller can be heard saying: “There was a UFO reported here, but that’s all taken care of now.”
One of those air traffic controllers later reported the sighting to the National UFO Reporting Center, according to NewsNation.
The close encounter has similarities to former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao’s reported sighting of two cylindrical, metallic orbs while flying his personal plane over the Texas panhandle last summer.
Chiao told The Post that the two objects passed roughly 10 feet under his wings, showed no visible means of propulsion, and were unlike anything the three-time space-goer had ever witnessed.
“There was nothing around me other than the panhandle of Texas at nine-thousand feet on this instrument flight plan and just suddenly these things appeared,” Chiao said. “They came right at me.”
