By Jacob Burg
Contributing Writer
A pilot flying near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport reported seeing an “unknown phenomenon” strobing and moving as if running on a racetrack hundreds of feet above the busy airport before vanishing from the morning sky.
Earlier in 2021, the same year as the Ronald Reagan airport sighting, pilots reported a “long cylindrical object” that passed right over the top of their aircraft.
It was eerily similar to the description of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) that the Pentagon told Congress about in 2024, in which government contractors saw a “large metallic cylinder about the size of a commercial airplane” float in midair before suddenly disappearing.
These pilot reports come from a centralized digital hub containing thousands of government records on unidentified flying objects — now referred to as UAPs by the Pentagon — that the National Archives released to the public in April.
Among troves of photos, documents and videos from the government’s own investigations into UAPs is a batch of records from the Federal Aviation Administration that contain UAP reports filed by pilots spanning from 2007 to 2024.
Opinion is split on the veracity of these reports, with some standing behind the pilots’ testimonies and others offering a skeptical interpretation.
Explained and Unexplained UFO Reports
As with any reports of potentially unidentified phenomena, many of the sightings pilots gave to the FAA between 2007 and 2024 include misidentifications of satellites, balloons, space debris, and other aircraft, along with sightings of lights or objects that seemingly defy conventional explanations.
In one sighting from 2009, a pilot reported seeing an object that “resembles a very large kite.”
In September 2022, a pilot flying near Liberal, Kansas, described a “sea of flashing white lights” flying beneath his plane.
Similar to the explanation the U.S. military gave for the famous Roswell event in 1947, the debris of which was eventually attributed to a weather balloon, many of the FAA reports were determined to be balloons, including one from 2021 that the agency said was a “silver balloon traveling upward at approximately 11,000 feet.”
On Feb. 3, 2023, there was a multi-sighting event of a large balloon that generated more than a dozen individual reports. Notably, that was one day before the Air Force shot down a Chinese spy balloon that had been seen over U.S. airspace the previous week.
It’s not clear whether these reports are of the same balloon, and the FAA did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
Some of the other UAP reports from pilots submitted to the FAA were attributed to space debris, rockets, or potentially other airplanes, while others included potential satellites or possible cases of Starlink satellite sightings.
Others, however, were not as easily explained within the reports themselves. In an early report from 2007, at least 12 aircraft reported seeing a UAP near Hayden, Colorado, that was apparently “tracking” them. The FAA did not see a radar return for the object.
Many pilots report seeing lights that move erratically or rapidly change altitude before hovering. In another report, a pilot saw a UAP “strobing in a race track formation” near Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington before disappearing minutes later.
Another pilot reported seeing a UAP with alternating red, white and green lights match his speed, direction and altitude for more than 15 minutes. A different aircraft confirmed the object, while the North American Aerospace Defense Command stated it “observed nothing in the area” such as other planes or military aircraft.
In November 2024, the Pentagon told Congress that people in two cars belonging to government contractors saw a “large metallic cylinder about the size of a commercial airplane” while leaving a U.S. government facility at about 9 a.m. local time.
The object was stationary and had a “very bright white light behind or around the object.”
After roughly 15 to 20 seconds, the object suddenly disappeared. Because of its size and the fact that it vanished without a trace, the sighting was left as unexplained or “anomalous,” according to the Pentagon.
In 2018, a circular object with “red and green strobe lights” was seen over Columbia City Hospital in Columbia City, Indiana, by multiple witnesses, according to the FAA’s UAP reports.
During the Pentagon’s testimony to Congress in 2024 on UAPs, Jon T. Kosloski, the new director for the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, noted a second unexplained sighting.
A law enforcement officer observed a large orb floating several hundred feet above the ground a couple of miles from the officer’s position. When he headed to its approximate location, which was well-lit, he observed the orb as being a “blacker-than-black” object about 4 to 6 feet wide, Kosloski said.
When the officer was about 130 to 200 feet from the black object, it tilted roughly 45 degrees before shooting vertically into the air many times faster than any drone the officer had seen before, Kosloski said.
“It did that without making a sound,” he said. “And just as it left his field of view through his windshield, then it emitted very bright red and blue lights that illuminated the inside of his vehicle as brightly as if someone had set off fireworks just outside.”
The case remains unexplained because of the object’s size, its rapid acceleration, and the lack of any disturbance on the ground beneath it after disappearing, Kosloski said.
Implications of UAP Reports
Speculation regarding the source of the unidentified objects that pilots have reported seeing has persisted long before the FAA began compiling them in its databases.
A veteran pilot, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his job at a U.S. commercial airline, said that he wonders whether some of these UAPs are advanced U.S. military projects.
However, there is no way of knowing for sure if one is not “read into” the classified program, he said.
Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves told Congress in July 2023 about two incidents he experienced off the coast of Virginia Beach.
In 2013, and again in 2014, Graves saw UAPs that had no visible means of lift or propulsion, lacked control surfaces, and did not resemble known aircraft with wings, flaps, or engines.
Similar to other FAA UAP reports, Graves said some of the objects flew in a racetrack formation.
After repeatedly seeing those objects making abrupt and unexplained maneuvers on radar screens more than 10 years ago, Graves founded Americans for Safe Aerospace to provide support, research and public education for pilots who experience UAPs.
“The specific definition that [the Pentagon] uses for [UAPs] … is exhibiting capabilities beyond the state of the art. That’s what my data supports,” said Graves, describing the voluminous reports he has compiled from pilots.
However, he doesn’t believe the theories that suggest his experiences were caused by U.S. military tests being conducted on its own soldiers, noting it would be illegal under the executive order that created the current classification system.
“Not telling us and exposing us to the technology would be illegal,” Graves said. “It would be no different than if they handed me a file of top secret information that I wasn’t cleared to. That’s because I’m not ‘read into’ the program. They have a responsibility in order to avoid spillages such as that.”
What, then, do commercial aviation experts have to say about pilots reporting UAPs?
Richard Levy, who worked for decades as an American Airlines pilot and consults on aviation safety, said that while he has never seen a UAP himself, he supports pilots making reports.
“I stand by them if they’re attesting that with their sensory eyeballs and judgment that they see something that they cannot explain, some aircraft, some light that makes no sense to them, or does not have any traffic [on radar] to explain that,” Levy said.
“What they saw, that’s a different issue. But I stand by what they say.”
However, some in the industry are skeptical of the veracity of pilot UAP reports.
Shem Malmquist, who has worked in aviation for nearly 40 years, including as a commercial pilot, professor and safety consultant, said that he believes most reports are misidentifications of common phenomena such as space debris or satellites, or merely optical illusions.
“These are really cool optical illusions. The thing is that our brain just did not evolve to be in that kind of environment,” he said. “Your perception, your space, your distances, heights, altitudes — it’s all just outside of how your brain processes information.”
He said both airline and military pilots are “not trained on visual perception or looking at different things,” but instead trained on very specific tasks.
“They’ll look at something and they think they know what they’re talking about. They think they understand it, but it’s … something outside their area of expertise.”
Shawn Pruchnicki, an aviation professor at Ohio State University and a former contract senior research engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center, agrees that pilots are not directly trained to spot unexplainable phenomena in the sky.
“Nowhere through those training steps is there any type of training or discussion … anywhere about doing just that: trying to differentiate one from another, and trying to distinguish physical, visual illusions from potential actual targets, or anything of the like,” Pruchnicki said.
He has looked at scores of pilot UAP reports and says some are truly out of the ordinary. And, he says, pilots like himself are familiar with aircraft performance.
“So it isn’t always so much a matter of colors of orbs and these types of things, but rather simply, the movements that the apparent vehicles are making are what makes them interesting,” he said.
Pilots also have an understanding of aerodynamics at high altitudes, he said.
“We understand that all of a sudden to be able to just turn on a dime, so to speak, and go straight up and disappear, that, aerodynamically speaking — and from a human performance standard — that is extremely unusual and very, very unlikely,” Pruchnicki said.
He said there are some reports, confirmed on radar, of objects traveling incredible distances in a matter of seconds, upwards to Mach 30.
“That’s incredible. No one possesses anything like that,” he said. “We’re still struggling on the planet with developing vehicles that can sustain around Mach 5 or Mach 6.”
While there’s a possibility the radar could be misled into thinking the objects are traveling at those speeds, pilot UAP reports still need to be analyzed, Pruchnicki said.
“At the end of the day, the bottom line is, what does this threat pose to flight safety?” he said.
