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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Proposed Government Amendment Hints at Strange Effects from UFOs
A historic amendment could establish a United States government office to study UFOs — a major development signifying the government may be ready to treat the UFO phenomenon seriously. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has quietly introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2022 that, if passed, would radically transform the US government’s treatment of UFOs.
Nick Pope, who worked for the UK’s Ministry of Defense investigating UFOs, said, “The main takeaways, obviously, are to replace the existing UAP taskforce with an Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office to loop in almost every part of the military and the intelligence community. And in terms of accountability, to have this independent watchdog, the Aerial and Transmedium Phenomena Advisory Committee sitting over a lot of this, selecting people from the Galileo Project, from the Scientific Coalition for Ufology, and bodies like that — it’s unprecedented.”
A significant development in this amendment is the inclusion of civilian scientific experts, specifically mentioning professor Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project. But the US government has had a bumpy history with civilian scientists.
“What it’s trying to do is blend together the government side of this with the scientific and academic community side, and I think for many, many years there has been a disconnect,” Pope said. “Government doesn’t do science very well. Here in the language of Sen. Gillibrand’s amendment, we have an attempt to fix that, to try and bring in scientists and academics, and loop in their expertise so that it can be properly leveraged.”
