An experienced US Air Force pilot had a brush with the unknown during a classified flight over California last September. Cruising through controlled airspace at 20,000 feet, he spotted a mysterious object, a dark grey, cylindrical shape, no bigger than a football, zipping dangerously close beneath his wing.
The intriguing encounter, captured in newly leaked audio, has stirred fresh debate over unidentified aerial phenomena. “This is going to sound weird,” the pilot, identified by the call sign “Troy 21,” radioed to air traffic control in Los Angeles at 2:30 pm on September 17.
“But I just had something pass underneath my wing. Maybe a football-sized object right under my wing,” he said.
As per The New York Post, at the time of the incident, the pilot was conducting a mission linked to the Department of Homeland Security. The specifics of his assignment remain undisclosed. With clear skies providing optimal visibility, he described the object as moving with precision, showing no obvious signs of propulsion.
The air traffic controller, trying to make sense of the sighting, inquired whether it could have been a drone. But at that altitude, drones, especially ones small enough to be football-sized, are rare.
“I’ve got my sensor operator looking for it on the camera right now, we’ll see if we can find it,” Troy 21 reported, scanning for any sign of the anomaly.
“But 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,” he added, emphasising just how close the near miss was.
Less than a minute later, the pilot’s onboard radar detected an object at a distance. Within 40 seconds, it reappeared, this time, an astonishing 60 miles away. If it was indeed the same object, it would have had to travel at speeds exceeding Mach 2 to cover that distance in such a short span.
Later in the recording, another air traffic controller is heard acknowledging the report: “There was a UFO reported here, but that’s all taken care of now.”
The unusual sighting was later logged with the National UFO Reporting Center, adding yet another case to the growing list of unexplained aerial encounters.
???? This is absolutely incredible.. A football sized UAP passes right underneath a passenger planes wing. It was caught by pilots, video, and sensors. @NewsNation #ufotwitter #ufoX #uaptwitter #UAP pic.twitter.com/bdVfAOlQmd
— UAP Reporting Center (@UAPReportingCnt) February 20, 2025
Interestingly, this event bears similarities to a report from former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao, who last summer encountered two metallic, cylindrical objects while flying his personal aircraft over the Texas panhandle.
“There was nothing around me other than the panhandle of Texas at nine-thousand feet on this instrument flight plane and just suddenly these things appeared,” Chiao recalled.
He described them as smooth, propulsion-less orbs that passed just ten feet beneath his wings—an eerily familiar description to Troy 21’s experience.