The reports add to those given by military pilots and officials over the past eight years, particularly following the release of the famous Pentagon UFO videos.
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 (UFOs)—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 (FAA) that contain UAP reports filed by pilots spanning from 2007 to 2024.
The Epoch Times reviewed hundreds of these reports and discussed them with aviation experts. 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.
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.
By Jacob Burg
