By Henry Holloway
Leaked audio of the incident has emerged which saw the pilot flying his Piper PA32 aircraft around 6,000ft over Long Island.
He saw a UFO in front of his plane and radioed what he saw in to air traffic controllers. The controller suggests the object was just a drone, but the pilot replies it is too big to be a drone and has lights on it. Nothing showed up on the tower’s radar throughout the whole incident, and the UFO eventually vanished behind a cloud.
And the pilot was then called in to give a report after his trip Minute Man Airfield in Massachusetts and Old Bridge Airport in New Jersey. The Drive reports the pilot’s report on the encounter remains classified. And the official statement by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says the pilot saw a “drone-like object”. The aircraft was flying near John F Kennedy International Airport when the encounter occurred. And an investigation into the incident is ongoing, the FAA said.
The pilot said: “I have an object in front of me, I don’t know what it is.”
And the air traffic controller replied: “You mean like a drone or something?
“I don’t think it's a drone, it's bigger than a drone,” the pilot responds, to which the pilot says “well I don’t see anything on radar”.
In a later exchange the pilot says “it looks like it had lights on it” and the traffic controller says “I still see nothing on radar”.
And the pilot also insists he is "not delusional" at one point during the conversation.
The eerie mid-air meeting is the latest in a series of strange encounters to emerge from the US. The air traffic controller in this exchange seems keen to write the incident off as a “drone”.
He said: "Ok, I mean, we'll have to assume that it was a drone.
"I mean I don't know, if that's the safe assumption or not but I guess that's what we will go by.
UFO sightings are often associated with claims of alien spacecraft by ET hunters. However, the term UFO can refer to all number of items – and simply means it is not known what the flying object was. Earlier this year a classified Pentagon report emerged which detailed an encounter between US Navy warplanes and a UFO. And in Britain the pilot of an Airbus reported a “near miss” with a UFO over Glasgow.
