On the afternoon of 9/17/24, the NUFORC hotline received a call from an air traffic controller operating out of the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, CA. The controller had just had just received a communication from the crew of TROY21, a Beechcraft King Air 350iER flying a homeland security mission near Reef Station in eastern California. The crew reported that a football sized grey cylinder had passed approximately 10ft. under their right wing. A minute later the crew contacted the center again to report that the object had been picked up on radar approximately 60 miles away. The air traffic controller was asked to file a written report on our website, which they did.

After calculating that the object’s speed must have been at least Mach 4 to cover 60 miles in a minute, NUFORC contacted Ben Hansen, a well known UFO investigator and pilot himself, who collaborates with us on investigating highly anomalous and credible pilot reports. Ben kicked off a far reaching inquiry into the event, beginning with the filing of a Freedom of Information Act request to get access to the radar data. After a few months, he was finally successful in getting a response, which included a full recording of the communications between air traffic control and the flight crew. You can listen to that recording in the video attached to the original written report here: https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=183084

On February 19, Ben presented his initial findings on the case in an interview on NewsNation. The interview featured an animation that was created to visualize the event, from which the image below is taken.

Fortuitously, crewmembers from the original flight saw the interview, and reached out to Ben to talk about it in more detail. We were thus able to learn that they originally thought the object could have been a missile, and took evasive action, instinctively banking to the left to pop up the wing so as to avoid it. The crew also related that after the object was picked up on the aircraft’s sophisticated radar 60 miles away, it “jumped” 20 miles back towards them in a matter of seconds. It then “jumped” back to 30 miles away, and then re-approached to 10 miles, all within seconds.

Ben was re-interviewed on NewsNation on April 24th, where he presented the latest updates on the case. You can watch that full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nuro6AKH9o

The investigation is ongoing, primarily focusing now on analyzing the raw radar data files that were also obtained through the FOIA. The radar analysis is being led by Francis Ridge, director of the MADAR project. We’ll update this report with any additional details as it is received.