US military pilot has close encounter with UFO: 'This is going to sound weird'

What you're about to hear is the voices of the pilot and air traffic controllers, and it's set to computer animation. Take a look. Troy 2-1, go ahead. It's not weird, but I just had some tasks in my wing, maybe like objects right underneath our wing. Troy 2-1, Roger. Do you think it was a drone or? I have no idea. I got my sensor operator looking for it on the camera, and we'll see if we can find it. Troy 2-1, Roger. Thank you for the report. Keep me advised if you find anything else out. Yeah, we'll do. We're looking for it now. Troy 2-1, we got something on the air. Troy 2-1, Roger. Troy 2-1, Sagan. Four bearing from a mile away is where we're picking it up now. Troy 1-5, OK. Troy 2-1, Roger. Thank you. All right. This guy, we stopped at 14 for him because we were busy. There was some UFO reported here, but that's all taken care of now, so you don't have to worry about it unless you want to talk to Aaron earlier, but it's gone. I may not have to worry about it, but I am plenty worried about it. This is where I call in Ben Hanson to help me make heads or tails of this. Ben is a former FBI special agent and host of UFO Witness on Discovery+. He managed to secure that recording that you just heard because it was not made available to the public. Ben, what is your take? This is a really interesting case. It was actually the air traffic controller who reported it to the National UFO Reporting Center, or NUFORC. NUFORC is actually cited in the FAA regs as one of the places where pilots can go to make reports. First, we want to thank the controller for reporting it and also for the pilots. This was a homeland security flight, actually. So they were on, I don't want to say covert, but they were on a mission, probably doing drug interdiction or something like that, and they're flying along and they see this thing. So very experienced pilots. Now, this particular aircraft, too, is a Beechcraft 350C, which they've converted to include a very sensitive and complex radar array. So you see that dome on the top of it? It's actually there to track drug traffickers and things like that. So when they call this thing in, this is about 2.30 in the afternoon. It's September 17th of last year. It's broad daylight. They got a good look at this thing. Cylindrical, dark object that passes underneath their wings so close. So, I mean, obviously you can see there's big problems with that happening in controlled airspace like they were, and they weren't notified of any air traffic that was supposed to be in the area. So the animation, by the way, it's so realistic. I was caught off guard. Was that sort of made with the help of those who witnessed it so that it's as accurate as it can be? Well, in this case, we have not, my team has not spoken with the crew, as you can imagine, because they're, the sensitivity of probably what they were doing on this mission, it wouldn't benefit them to come forward and talk to the public quite yet. We'd encourage it, yes, but this was our rendering of, just based on the audio that we had, it's a guess, right? That object could have gone underneath from left to right, forward to back, we don't know. But we do know their description is pretty exact. I'm also sort of gobsmacked by 20,000 feet, because I don't think that ground controlled, you know, unmanned flights can operate at that altitude. Call me crazy, I think at one point they asked if it was a drone. What's the word on the possibility of some kind of a drone activity? So it actually, it could be, it'd be very rare, but hobby drones can go up that high, obviously military can as well. This occurred near what we call military operations area, but it was not in that airspace. So anyone who was flying something to test a commercial type of drone or something would have had to call in. Now, the other thing that's very interesting about this is you hear them call out what they believe, they're tracking this object about 60 miles away, because they've got their own airborne radar. And the pilot calls back to our traffic control says, we think we have it now. Debatable whether their radar ray could see something this small at 60 miles. But if true, if true, within the two minutes when they called back, that would place this object going about Mach two, okay, from them to gain that much distance in that amount of time. So that would absolutely, in my opinion, eliminate any prosaic explanation of a drone or anything of that nature. Thanks for watching. Go to joinnn.com to find NewsNation on your screen. And don't forget to click the red subscribe button below to get more of NewsNation's fact-driven, unbiased coverage.