Vegas Helicopter Pilot Reports UFO Visible Only With Night Vision
At about 9 pm on Saturday, March 16, a bizarre exchange between an air ambulance helicopter and ground control in Las Vegas revealed a pilot’s sighting of a UFO, which he claims was only visible with the aid of night vision. When the pilot reports the situation to an air traffic controller, he excitedly responds with “oh, that’s awesome…”
According to a recording of the interaction, the pilot flying an Agusta 119 Koala helicopter radioed in to ask if ground control had anything on their radar flying at about 7,000 feet, nine miles west of Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport. The pilot refers to this vicinity as the “Southern Hills area,” a corner of the Vegas metro area.
The air traffic controller quickly responds saying he does not have anything in that area, to which the pilot responds telling him he can only see it with his night vision goggles on.
The short interaction was recently uploaded to SoundCloud and can be heard below. But the real investigative digging thus far, has come from Tyler Rogoway at The Drive, who has consistently kept his finger on the pulse of all things strange and unexplained going on in the aviation world.
While the pilot guesses that the object could have been a balloon, it seems it would have to have been a rather large balloon to be at that altitude and be observable from nine miles away – the distance the pilot claims he was flying at when he witnessed it.
What makes Rogoway’s investigation into the matter even more mysterious is that when he attempted to contact Air Methods, the helicopter’s company headquarters and the operations base, to speak to the pilot, he was met with resistance.
Rogoway says he was told the company couldn’t comment and that the pilot was prohibited from speaking to anyone about the event. Instead they redirected him to someone else within the company who hasn’t given any response in “well over 24 hours.”
So, what could it have been that the pilot witnessed?
Several commenters on Rogoway’s article who appear to have various degrees of experience in aviation bring up the possibility that the pilot may have witnessed a hot air balloon. Though it seems highly unlikely a hot air balloon would be floating at 7,000 feet in highly trafficked airspace in the middle of the night. Also, the average altitude that hot air balloons typically reach is somewhere between 1,000 to 3,000 feet.
Others point to the relatively obvious fact that Vegas is not far from the notorious Groom lake Air Force base, a.k.a. Area 51. Was this some type of secret aircraft with cloaking technology being tested by the military?
Or could it be the possibility that everyone secretly wants it to be? The response from Air Methods certainly doesn’t seem to support any of the mundane explanations.
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The New Phoenix Lights Sighting Rekindles Mystery of the 90s
Those of us who were in Phoenix, Arizona, in the spring of 1997 were treated to a still-baffling phenomenon. Unlike many other UFO sightings, the one on March 13, now famously called “The Phoenix Lights,” was undeniable in its length, breadth, and duration. Thousands of people stood in astonishment as a gigantic alien craft hovered without a sound, in plain sight, catching the attention of the local and national news media, as well as the governor. But this was no once-in-a-lifetime event — just before the close of 2019, Phoenix was again visited by what many witnesses say were extraterrestrial spacecraft.
When events such as these mass sightings occur, the official reports are quite predictable. Regardless of what thousands of people attest to, government and military officials release statements that are beyond absurd to those whose experiences are undeniable. In the 1997 incident over Phoenix, the US Air Force attributed the sighting to flares dropped by an A-10 Warthog military aircraft engaged in training exercises at the Barry Goldwater Range in Southwest Arizona. However, eyewitnesses know what they saw: five lights in a formation that slowly loomed over Phoenix like a cloud for more than three hours, from 7.30 p.m. to 10.30 p.m.
Arizona’s governor, Fife Symington, later testified that he witnessed a massive delta-shaped craft silently navigate over the Squaw Peak mountain range. “It was truly breathtaking… I was absolutely stunned… As a pilot and former Air Force officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I’d ever seen.”
