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A startled American Airlines pilot reported a “long cylindrical object” in the New Mexico sky that came uncomfortably close to the aircraft, according to his radio transmission to an air traffic control tower.
The encounter occurred Sunday during a flight from Cincinnati to Phoenix, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
“The FBI is aware of the reported incident,” the agency told The Albuquerque Journal in a statement, adding that its policy is to “neither confirm nor deny investigations.”
“Do you have any targets up here?” the pilot asked the Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center in a radio transmission shortly after noon local time. “We just had something just go over the top of us that — I hate to say this — looked like a long, cylindrical object.”
It “almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing moving really fast that went right over the top of us,” he added. (Listen to the transmission in the video above.)
The communication was first reported — and recorded — by the Deep Black Horizon blog, which noted that the encounter occurred on the aircraft’s flight path in the northeast corner of New Mexico.
Blogger Steve Douglass told ABC 7 News that the incident occurred at about 37,000 feet and that there was no significant military presence in the area at the time.
Douglass said an ex-military pilot told him that for the airline pilot to see the object it must have been coming nearly head-on. So “whatever it was came fast, right at them and right over them, which gave them a big enough scare that they had to report it,” he said.
The FAA confirmed in a statement to NBC that a “pilot reported seeing an object over New Mexico shortly after noon local time on Sunday.” Air traffic controllers did “not see any object in the area on their radarscopes,” the statement added.
American Airlines also confirmed the incident. “Following a debrief with our flight crew and additional information received, we can confirm this radio transmission was from American Airlines Flight 2292 on Feb. 21,” the company said.
New Mexico has a reputation for reputed incidents involving unidentified flying objects over places such as Roswell, Socorro and Aztec.
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