Both the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and American Airlines (A1G) (AAL) confirmed the Airbus pilot’s report of an encounter with an unidentified flying object.
The object was said to be seen by the crew of Airbus A320 on American Airlines Flight 2292 on February 21, 2021 over New Mexico. On route from Cincinnati to Phoenix, the aircraft was buzzed by a “long cylindrical object”.
The pilots contacted a traffic control center. Their conversation was picked up by the aviation blogger Steve Douglas, and later reported by The Warzone, which tried to obtain a comment from various sources connected to the incident.
According to the media, American Airlines (A1G) (AAL) confirmed that the recorded transmission is genuine, and encouraged reporters to “reach out to the FBI”.
On February 24, the FAA responded to an inquiry too. The agency confirmed the pilot’s account as well, but noted that “FAA air traffic controllers did not see any object in the area on their radarscopes.”
The pilot described the unidentified object as a “cruise missile type of thing – moving really fast”. The account falls in line with documents declassified by the Pentagon in April 2020, as well as some other descriptions of cylindrical shapes encountered by pilots.
A similar encounter was also documented in April 2018, when Learjet 36 of Phoenix Air and Airbus A321 of American Airlines (A1G) (AAL) have both reported a strange object passing over them near the New Mexico border.
The region is known for high activity of military aircraft due to the abundance of airbases nearby. Despite that, according to Steve Douglas, no flights matching the place and time were registered by flight monitoring services