Friday, November 13, 2026

Nationwide Ground Stop: FAA Freezes Every U.S. Departure After Air Traffic Control Communications Failure

Air travel across the United States came to a sudden halt Friday afternoon. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered an extremely rare nationwide ground stop at every U.S. airport on Nov. 13, 2026, "due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety." The cause, according to the FAA and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, was a communication problem hitting the air traffic control centers that guide planes across the country.

As of 2:45 p.m. Arizona time (MST), Friday, Nov. 13. This is a developing story, and we'll update it as the FAA shares more.

Departures frozen coast to coast

An advisory from the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center put the ground stop into effect at 2:54 p.m. Central time, which is 1:54 p.m. Arizona time. Its message was blunt: "All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice." Planes already in the air were allowed to keep flying and land. The FAA said inbound international flights would be "managed on a case by case basis."

Flight tracker Flightradar24 broke the news to millions of followers within minutes:

via @flightradar24 on X

That post has been viewed more than 1.1 million times. A few minutes later, Flightradar24 said about 3,100 aircraft were in the air headed for U.S. airports, and that "no additional aircraft are taking off at this time."

What went wrong?

Secretary Duffy confirmed the stop on X and pointed to a communications failure at the centers that manage high-altitude traffic between airports:

via @SecDuffy on X

The FAA's own statement was a little narrower. It said the problem hit "multiple" Air Route Traffic Control Centers, while Duffy said "all" of them. Charlotte Douglas International Airport told WBTV the stop was tied to "an FAA equipment outage." American Airlines told customers on X that the FAA was "working to resolve a technical issue affecting telecommunications at many air traffic control facilities across the country."

What actually failed, and why, has not been explained. Some accounts on X have speculated about a cyberattack, but no official has said anything to support that. For now, treat any claim about the root cause as unconfirmed.

The Associated Press summed up the situation for its 16 million followers:

via @AP on X

Only the second time since 9/11

Nationwide ground stops almost never happen. The last one came on Jan. 11, 2023, when the FAA's NOTAM pilot-alert system failed. Departures were paused for about 90 minutes, and the ripple effects caused more than 10,000 delays and over 1,300 cancellations. Before that, the whole U.S. airspace was cleared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Where things stand now

The FAA advisory listed an estimated end time of 10 p.m. Central (9 p.m. Arizona time), but it also said "until further notice," and the FAA has not said when flights will resume. As of 2:45 p.m. Arizona time, the FAA had not publicly announced that the stop was lifted. However, the FAA's live airport status feed, last updated at 2:41 p.m. Arizona time, no longer showed a separate nationwide ground stop. Instead, it showed departure delays at major airports, which may mean departures are starting to restart. That has not been officially confirmed.

The feed showed departure delays of up to 1 hour and 45 minutes at Chicago O'Hare and Teterboro. It also showed delays of up to an hour at Phoenix Sky Harbor, Newark and Miami. On the ground, a passenger at LAX told CBS News that newly landed planes couldn't get to their gates because departing jets were stuck in place.

If you're flying tonight, check your airline's app before heading to the airport, and expect delays and cancellations to keep rippling through the evening even after departures resume.

We'll update this story as the FAA shares more.

Sources

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'Good Luck With the Aliens': The Silver Canister That Hovered Off a Pilot's Wingtip Over Rhode Island



Picture a calm flight over Rhode Island. You're at about 3,500 feet in a small single-engine plane, the bay glittering below, nothing on the radio but routine chatter. Then you glance out the right window and something is sitting there. Not flying past. Sitting there. A little silver canister, apparently hanging in the air right off your wingtip.

That's the story one private pilot told air traffic controllers at Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport, and the recording of that radio exchange has been making the rounds again this week. It's short, it's strange, and it comes with one of the best deadpan lines ever heard on an aviation frequency.

"A small silver canister. Do you know what that could be?"

According to the air traffic control audio, published by the aviation YouTube channel VASAviation and reported by Fox News and NewsNation, the pilot was flying a Piper PA-32RT-300T Turbo Lance II, a six-seat, single-engine propeller plane. He keyed the mic and told the controller:

"Looks like a strange, small object that we just floated by. A small silver canister. Do you know what that could be?"

He added that it "appears to be standing still." According to the reports, the object was near the plane's right wingtip, appeared to move alongside the aircraft for a while, and then was simply gone from view.

The controller did exactly what you'd hope a controller would do: checked for other traffic and asked the sensible question. There were no other reports of an object in the area, and ATC asked whether it might be a drone or a balloon.

The pilot's answer is the part that sticks with you:

"I saw nothing attached to it. It was sort of hovering there. It was astonishing. I don't know what it was."

"Good luck with the aliens"

Then the frequency did what aviation frequencies sometimes do when something odd happens: it got a little playful. One voice called the encounter "creepy." Another pilot listening in chimed in with "I want to believe him," a nod to the famous X-Files poster. And someone on the frequency signed off the moment with a line that has since become the headline of the whole story: "Good luck with the aliens."

It's funny, but it also says something about how pilot reports have traditionally been received. For decades, pilots who saw something odd often kept quiet because of the stigma. Here, the report went out on an open frequency, got logged, and got a laugh, but nobody told him he was crazy.

What we actually know, and what we don't

It's worth being careful here, because this one tends to get oversold. There is no photo or video of the object itself. What's circulating is the ATC audio, packaged by VASAviation in its usual style with map and radar graphics synced to the radio calls. So the "UFO video" headlines are really about a recording of a conversation about a UFO.

The exact date of the flight is also fuzzy. The recording was posted by VASAviation, and the coverage describes it as having surfaced and then resurfaced, but the reports don't agree on precisely when the flight happened. The controller also said there were no other reports in the area, and nothing in the coverage says the object was confirmed on radar.

When Fox News Digital asked the FAA about it, the agency gave its standard explanation: it documents UAP sightings whenever a pilot reports one to an air traffic control facility, and if supporting information such as radar data corroborates the report, the FAA shares it with the UAP Task Force. Whether that happened in this case hasn't been made public.

So what was it?

Here's where we put on our speculation hat, and we'll say so plainly. The boring answers are genuinely good ones. A mylar party balloon, a balloon carrying a small instrument package, a consumer drone, or a piece of shiny drifting debris could all look like a "silver canister," and at the speed even a small plane flies, judging whether something is truly stationary is harder than it sounds. A balloon drifting with the wind can look eerily motionless from a moving cockpit.

But the pilot's own description pushes back a little. He specifically said he saw nothing attached to it, and he described it as hovering and then moving alongside the plane. Small metallic cylinders show up again and again in modern reports, including in material the Pentagon's UAP office has released, which is part of why a story like this gets people's attention. That doesn't make it alien. It just makes it part of a pattern people want explained.

The real problem: one witness, no data

This little encounter is a perfect example of why the UAP debate keeps going in circles. One sincere witness, a few seconds of observation, no imagery, and no corroborating radar. You can't prove it was a balloon, and you can't prove it wasn't.

That's exactly the gap some scientists say they want to close. Just this week, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told NewsNation's "The Hill" that his team plans to assemble a prototype system at an Ithaca, New York, observatory that was once home to Carl Sagan, using radar to spot objects and then steering a meter-class telescope onto them to capture high-resolution images and a spectrum. As he put it, "You can actually resolve them and figure out what they are."

Until tools like that are watching the skies, cases like the Rhode Island silver canister will stay where they are now: a strange voice on the radio, a laugh from the controllers, and a pilot who honestly doesn't know what floated past his wing.

What do you think he saw? A runaway balloon, a drone, or something else? Let us know in the comments.

Sources: Fox News, NewsNation, ATC audio via VASAviation, and NewsNation on Avi Loeb's telescope plan.

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Thursday, November 12, 2026

Outlook Goes Dark Worldwide: Inside Microsoft's Massive 365 Outage



If your inbox refused to load on Thursday, you were far from alone. A global Microsoft 365 outage knocked out Outlook email for huge numbers of people on Nov. 12, 2026, and also hit Teams, Copilot, SharePoint, OneDrive and admin tools across dozens of countries. As of Thursday night, Microsoft still had not fully restored service and had given no timeline for a fix.

How it started

The trouble started late Thursday morning, Arizona time. Downdetector began logging Outlook problems around 12:27 p.m. Eastern (10:27 a.m. Arizona time). Within half an hour, Microsoft's official status account confirmed something was wrong. At first it said the problem was limited to the Americas:

via @MSFT365Status on X

That post has since been seen more than 13 million times. Less than 15 minutes later, Microsoft widened the warning, saying the issue "may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region."

A global spike in an hour

Reports climbed fast. Downdetector says reports of Outlook problems peaked at roughly 138,000 around 1 p.m. Eastern. The outage tracker also posted a map showing how quickly the problem spread around the world:

via @downdetector on X

The knock-on effects reached past Microsoft's own apps. Reuters and The Guardian reported that the outage broke Microsoft 365 connectors used by OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services. In Australia, where Friday's workday had begun, the Australian Federal Police and the spy agency ASIO both confirmed they were affected. The Australian government also activated a cyber agreement with Microsoft to get its services restored on priority.

What went wrong?

Microsoft's explanation changed over the course of the day. At first, the company blamed "elevated load" on part of its infrastructure. Later it clarified that the load was not caused by more traffic. Instead, it said "a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable" were "straining the remaining infrastructure," after the servers failed automated health checks. Microsoft said it paused all deployments, moved traffic off the affected systems and began restarting servers. It also said it had found no recent change linked to the start of the problem.

The Verge's Tom Warren, one of the best-connected reporters on the Microsoft beat, offered a different account from his sources:

via @tomwarren on X

Microsoft itself has not confirmed that a rollout caused the outage, so treat that report as unconfirmed for now. Still, Microsoft did say it was "assessing whether reverting a small number of recent configuration updates" could speed up recovery. Australia's Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, said Microsoft had told him it looked like "an update that has gone awry," and that the company did not believe it was a cyberattack. A Microsoft spokesperson also told The Guardian the company "had no indication of a cyber-attack."

Where things stand now

Recovery has been uneven. Around 4 p.m. Eastern, Microsoft said a new health-check method had brought some servers back. But by late afternoon it admitted its fixes "have not provided the anticipated relief." It said a "core process" on the affected servers was being overwhelmed. Some restored servers also went unresponsive again as soon as traffic returned. In its latest updates Thursday evening, Microsoft said the changes it had applied were "not taking as expected." It said it was now reviewing traffic routing to deal with "sustained traffic management imbalances."

Downdetector reports have dropped sharply from the midday peak, but tens of thousands of people were still reporting Outlook problems into the evening. Microsoft's public status page still lists Microsoft 365 as degraded, and it shows no Azure issues. If you're still locked out, Microsoft says recovery may happen gradually as apps reconnect, so restarting Outlook or Teams occasionally may help. Watch out for fake "Microsoft support" emails and calls, which tend to spike during outages like this.

We'll update this story as Microsoft shares more.

Sources

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Lights Over Popocatépetl: Is Mexico's Smoking Volcano a UFO Portal?

Mexico's Popocatépetl volcano is watched around the clock by government monitoring cameras, and those cameras keep catching things that aren't ash. This Spanish-language mini-documentary, posted November 9, 2026, rounds up the famous clips: the glowing "cylinder" that seemed to drop straight into the crater in 2012, and the swarm of about 20 lights filmed rising from the volcano in August 2023. The timing is no accident: on the night of the Day of the Dead this month, a webcam at Tlamacas reportedly caught more points of light climbing near the crater, while the volcano sat on yellow alert.

None of this is confirmed as anything otherworldly. The video also covers the official explanation about how night sensors amplify light, and satellites, meteors, space debris and even insects have all been floated. Still, a portal on a smoking volcano is a hard story to look away from. What do you think the cameras caught?

Video: "El Popocatépetl Es un Portal y las Cámaras del Gobierno lo Grabaron" by El DoQmentalista on YouTube.

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Three Lights Turning Over Gillette: The Wyoming Video a UFO Investigator Can't Explain




There's a school on the edge of Gillette, Wyoming, where one family goes for evening walks. Most people walk there for the fresh air. Sommer Chase goes there for the view, and not the one at ground level.

"We always go to Sunflower School, we just started watching them there," she told Cowboy State Daily. "That's where you can see them really well."

"Them" are three lights. In the videos Chase has posted, they hang in the dark Wyoming sky and turn in a triangle around a shared center, like the points of a slow, silent pinwheel. Her clips have pulled in hundreds of thousands of views, and her very first one passed 200,000. Now the man who reviews UFO reports for the whole state has weighed in, and his verdict is about as honest as it gets: he can't explain them.

THE LIGHTS ARE OUT

The story doesn't start in Wyoming. It starts a few hundred miles north, in Colstrip, Montana, where Sommer's husband, Cody Chase, worked the night shift at the Westmoreland coal mine. Beginning in 2019, he started noticing lights in the sky during his shifts, and he got into the habit of calling home in the middle of the night.

"He would call me in the middle of the night, and he would say the lights are out," Sommer said. "Sometimes he would see a lot of them. Sometimes just a couple."

In 2022 she finally saw them herself. In Montana, she said, they tended to show up anywhere from 1 to 3 a.m., and they could stick around for a while.

Then, in June of this year, the family and their two kids moved to Gillette, where Cody still works as a coal miner. A new town, a new sky, and, according to Sommer, the same lights.

A LIFETIME OF LOOKING UP

Chase says her sightings go back much further than the mine. As a kid on a North Dakota farm, she remembers riding with her grandmother at 6 in the morning, through fog, when a single light trailed behind the car "kind of like a car, but it was just the light," and then simply vanished. She also remembers her dad slamming his truck to a stop and shouting that he'd seen a UFO.

For years she kept her videos to herself, worried about the old stigma. "I was like, 'If I post about these, no one's going to believe it,'" she said. When she finally did post, she braced for mockery. What she got instead was a flood of people saying they'd seen the same thing, from the Netherlands to Australia, Texas, and Pennsylvania.

"They're everywhere," she said. "You just have to be there at the right time."

WHAT THE INVESTIGATOR SAID

Chase says the lights don't travel like satellites, and they don't have the telltale hum of a drone. Richard Beckwith, a former Rock Springs attorney who serves as Wyoming state director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), looked at her footage and landed in a similar spot.

"I must agree that the objects are very interesting, and I have no explanation at present for what the user recorded," Beckwith told Cowboy State Daily in a text.

But he was careful, too: "Remember, though, that because we can't explain it today, doesn't mean we won't be able to explain it in the future. For now, these objects are unidentified."

By Beckwith's count, 5 to 10 percent of sightings are never explained. For now, he puts Chase's footage in that group.

THE SKEPTIC'S CORNER

It's worth being fair here. Three lights turning in a circle is a classic look for things like searchlights playing on a cloud deck, and drones flying in formation, camera artifacts, or ordinary aircraft haven't been ruled out by anyone. Chase herself says she has wondered whether the lights could be classified or experimental military technology. A video plus a named witness is a good start, but without independent witnesses, radar, or exact times that could be checked against flight and satellite data, this one stays firmly in the "interesting and unexplained" column, not the "proof" column.

A WYOMING PATTERN

Chase's lights land in a state that already has a thick file of strange skies. Cowboy State Daily points out that earlier this year a Cody man filmed nearly two dozen glowing orbs rising over Cedar Mountain, which Beckwith also couldn't explain. In Sweetwater County, the sheriff's office has watched drone-like objects gather over the Red Desert and the Jim Bridger Power Plant for more than a year and now calls them the "new normal." And in 1991, a Cheyenne attorney and his father, a former Wyoming attorney general, reported a massive, silent craft hovering over their car on the highway between Gillette and Wright, lighting the road up like noon.

Notice a theme? Coal mines in Montana. A power plant in Sweetwater County. Gillette, the heart of America's coal country. Chase has noticed it too, and she has her own theory, which she offers as a guess and nothing more: maybe someone is keeping an eye on humanity's biggest energy operations.

"Maybe this is their Earth and we just live on it," she said. "They're not going to allow us to destroy their home."

That's speculation, plain and simple, and nobody has evidence for it. But it's the kind of what-if that makes you want to take a walk past Sunflower School some clear night and look up.

Whatever they are, Chase isn't scared. "If they really wanted to hurt us or kill us or anything, they would have done it already a long time ago," she said.

Have you seen three lights turning in a triangle where you live? Tell us in the comments.

Source: Emma Jane Jackson, "UFO Investigator Stumped By Gillette Woman's Video Of Rotating Lights In Night Sky," Cowboy State Daily, November 5, 2026 (https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/11/05/ufo-investigator-stumped-by-gillette-womans-new-footage-of-three-rotating-lights/).

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Wednesday, November 11, 2026

Lights Over Campo Largo: The Brazilian Farm Video That Went Viral, and What the Air Force Said


At dusk on Sunday, May 31, 2026, Mayk Leão was on the veranda of his small farm in rural Campo Largo, just outside Curitiba in southern Brazil. He pointed his iPhone at a forested ridge roughly three kilometers away. What he filmed was a cluster of colored lights hovering above the trees. He said it was round and huge, and that it went dark all at once. "I think I just saw a gigantic alien ship," he told his followers. Within days it had become Brazil's biggest UFO story of the year.

Video: 98 Live on YouTube (in Portuguese). The footage shows lights filmed at maximum phone zoom. What they are has not been verified.

Leão, 31, is a nursing technician who posts about animal rescue and farm life. That day, he said, began with something strange. While looking for a wild cat on the property, he found an electric fence knocked down. He also heard metallic noises that sounded like someone "choking" or a rope snapping, and he said something hovered over his house in the afternoon. That night came the lights. According to g1, his first Instagram video reached millions of views, and one report put it at 12.9 million. He went from about 46,000 followers to more than 1.4 million in three days.

The Brazilian Air Force (FAB) responded through DECEA, its airspace control department. On May 31, it said, "no object was identified by air defense radars or reported by local airports with information about unknown objects," and airspace control "occurred within normal parameters." Hernan Mostajo, an astronomer at the Observatório Cosmos, told SBT News he saw no early signs of editing, fraud, or AI in the footage. He also noted that atmospheric effects, the distance, and the shaking phone camera could explain how the lights appear to behave. His analysis was not conclusive.

Then came the most down-to-earth explanation. Wanderlei Zandona, a drone pilot and influencer, flew a drone from Leão's farm toward the lights, first at night and then again by day. His footage suggested the glow on the ridge came from a guesthouse called Chácara Paraíso, whose owners said the lights had always been there. Leão rejects that. He says those are not the lights he recorded, and he accuses others of trying to profit from his story. The two sides still disagree, and nobody has proven what was on that ridge.

The video set off a nationwide wave of copycat sightings. Within a week, new clips came from Bento Gonçalves in Rio Grande do Sul, the Chapada dos Veadeiros in Goiás, and a beach camera in Pontal do Paraná. The FAB again said its radars detected nothing unusual on the Bento Gonçalves date. The reports haven't stopped. This month alone, Brazilian outlets covered a bright light over João Pessoa on Nov. 2, which lined up with a visible International Space Station pass. On Nov. 9, a fiery streak crossed the sky over São Bernardo do Campo, and astronomers there split between space debris and a sunlit airplane contrail. Campo Largo remains the case that started the frenzy. It is also a good example of how a pixelated zoom shot, a remote ridge, and a huge audience can turn a few lights into a national mystery.

Sources: g1 Paraná · SBT News (FAB statement) · PEGN · Clube FM / Correio Braziliense (drone pilot) · CNN Brasil · g1 RS · Portal Correio · Hub News · Rede 98

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The Black Triangle Over the Ridge: FBI Agents' Silent UFO Encounter in the Pentagon's Latest Files


Picture the scene. It's late dusk somewhere in the mountains of the western United States. The last strip of sunset is glowing behind a ridgeline, the canyons below are sliding into shadow, and a team of federal agents is sitting at an observation post doing what the paperwork calls "routine observation support." Then someone calls out a heat signature to the west. What happened in the next few seconds is now one of the most talked-about documents in the Pentagon's latest batch of UFO files.

The Seventh Drop

On October 23, 2026, the Department of War published its seventh release of declassified UAP files under PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, which lives at war.gov/UFO. Unlike earlier batches, Scientific American noted that this one came with no videos or photos. Instead it's a pile of memos and interview reports. And the star of the show is a 2026 encounter involving FBI special agents and a small, silent, matte-black triangle.

Two documents describe it. One is a memo from AARO, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The other is an FBI FD-302, the form the Bureau uses to record interviews, filed as FBI-UAP-D043. The names, the date, the time, and the exact location are all redacted. What we know is that it happened around June 2026 at what the official summary calls "a national security site" in the western U.S.

What the Agents Saw

According to the agents' co-signed statement in the FD-302, a colleague at another observation post called out "a thermally elevated aerial object" to the west. One agent ran from the eastern side of their post to the western side, and almost immediately they spotted it: "a substantial, nonreflective, dark black triangular object most resembling a delta wing drone."

They put its wingspan at roughly nine to fifteen feet, its depth at six to nine feet, and its thickness at just one to two feet. One agent watched it through a handheld thermal device and said it looked hotter than the surrounding air, with "a completely consistent thermal signature" across the whole airframe and no visible exhaust. The other tracked it with the naked eye.

They say it rose vertically over a ridgeline a few miles to the west, then switched from vertical to horizontal flight at "a very significant velocity," swung toward them, and dropped southeast into terrain where they lost sight of it at about 1.5 miles away. Neither agent heard a thing.

The AARO Version Gets Even Stranger

The Pentagon memo adds detail that reads like a sci-fi script. As quoted by Audacy, it describes "a matte black triangular shape of extremely low aspect ratio that was nonreflective under the observed lighting conditions." The craft "did not tilt, sway, or wobble" during a controlled climb of about ten seconds, rising 200 to 300 feet above the ridge. Then it "instantaneously arrested all vertical motion and entered a stable hover for an estimated twenty seconds," before going "from a zero-velocity state directly into high-speed horizontal flight," banking smoothly and hugging the terrain down into "a canyon drainage" in two or three seconds. The witnesses compared the speed to a fighter jet, though no instrument actually measured it.

Scientific American reports that binocular views showed "no propulsive apertures, rotating elements, rivets, panels, windows, canopy, cabin structures," and no protrusions at all. The next morning, a ground team searched the canyon. They found no wreckage, no scarring, and no damaged vegetation, and no one reported any physical effects.

Here's a wrinkle worth pointing out: the two accounts don't line up perfectly. The FBI statement gives the total sighting as "approximately three seconds," while the AARO memo describes a ten-second climb and a twenty-second hover. Whether that's two different vantage points, a typo, or just how memory works under adrenaline, the files don't say.

The Cold Water

Not everyone is impressed. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of AARO, told Fox News Digital on November 1 that the agents' FBI badges aren't enough on their own. "There's a lot of people that like to point to folks as being credible witnesses and therefore their testimony must be taken at face value," he said. "And that is a classic case of authority bias."

He pointed out there are no photos or hard data, and compared some triangle reports to sightings of the F-117 stealth fighter back before the public knew it existed. He also stressed that "unresolved" in these files usually means there isn't enough data to decide, not that something is unexplainable. The War Department, for its part, confirmed that the nine images attached to the FBI report are forensic sketches and illustrations, not photographs of the object.

So What Was It?

Time to put on my speculation hat, and I want to be clear this part is just me wondering out loud. The agents themselves called it a "delta wing drone," and a classified test aircraft flying near a sensitive site at dusk would explain a lot: the quiet, the shape, the heat signature, and why nobody's saying where it happened. But a drone that climbs without a wobble, parks in midair, and then dives into a canyon at fighter speed without a whisper? If that's ours, somebody has been holding out on the rest of us.

For now, it's a redacted story with no pictures, two slightly different timelines, and a canyon that kept its secret. What do you think was hovering over that ridge? Let me know in the comments.

Sources: U.S. Department of War, PURSUE seventh release (war.gov/UFO, Oct. 23, 2026); FBI-UAP-D043, FD-302 "Unidentified Aerial Object Observation Report, 2026"; Scientific American, "Strange triangular craft reported in new U.S. government UFO release"; Audacy, "Mysterious 'flying triangle' sighting leads new government release of UFO documents"; Fox News Digital, "Former Pentagon UFO chief disputes FBI black triangle sighting," Nov. 1, 2026.

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Tuesday, November 10, 2026

The Jellyfish Over Anchorage: Three Minutes Above the Trees


Today, two posts on X sent a familiar shape back into circulation: a dark, jellyfish-like object with dangling arms, filmed against an Alaska sky. Attorney and radio host Eric Deters (@bulllaw) shared a 43-second clip this afternoon captioned, "Giant UFO with dangling tentacles hovers near US military base before vanishing." A little later, commentator Mario Nawfal posted a Daily Mail cut of similar footage and summarized the story behind it.

via @bulllaw on X

via @MarioNawfal on X

According to an interview published by the Daily Mail and also reported by IBTimes UK, the person who recorded it is Sara Jane Osborn. She said the encounter happened on June 15, 2026, at about 10:13 p.m., while she and her husband, Pete, were visiting Anchorage on business. The evening sky was still bright, as mid-June evenings in Alaska often are, and Osborn had been photographing a rainbow through an open car window along Sixth Avenue.

Pete pulled into an empty downtown parking area so she could get a clearer shot, and then something appeared on her phone screen. "I was annoyed, because I was like, is that a mosquito?" she told the Daily Mail. When she looked past the lens, she saw a dark shape hovering above distant trees. She described it as black and silver, with dangling appendages that seemed to move independently as it turned from side to side. She took still photographs in rapid succession, then started recording video.

Her first thought was a kite. The trees were moving in a breeze, but she said the motion did not match kite tails streaming in the wind. "It was very clearly not a kite in its movements," she said. The shape, by her estimate, stayed in view for about three minutes. "It disappeared almost as quickly as it came."

The couple then went looking for an ordinary explanation. They checked a nearby park for anyone packing up a kite and found no one, then drove toward Arctic Valley and searched for roughly 30 minutes. Pete estimated the object might have been within about three miles, though that distance was never confirmed.

The couple believed the object was in the direction of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the Anchorage-area installation that supports F-22 Raptor operations. That part of the story has not been independently verified. Neither outlet established a military connection, and a kite, a drone, or another conventional object has not been ruled out. Osborn herself left the door open. "You know, maybe it's a drone-type thing," she said. She also said they could not find anyone else who saw it at the same time. "Because it was there, and then it wasn't," she said. "I can't deny that it happened."

If the silhouette looks familiar, there is a reason. In January 2024, filmmaker Jeremy Corbell released infrared footage of a bulbous, tentacled object that he said had been filmed over a U.S. joint operations base in Iraq in 2018. The clip, quickly nicknamed the "jellyfish" UAP, showed an irregular shape with trailing appendages drifting over a military installation. Corbell claimed the object later displayed transmedium behavior, including a stretch underwater.

The official record, released later, put the filming on October 23, 2017, not 2018. An infrared sensor aboard a force-protection aerostat flying at 2,700 feet above Al Taqaddum Air Base, Iraq, recorded 17 minutes and 30 seconds of the object. The Defense Department later posted the video through DVIDS as "The Al Taqaddum Object." On September 8, 2025, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office assessed with high confidence that it was not anomalous and was consistent with a cluster of fully and partially inflated balloons, moving at roughly 4 to 14 miles per hour with the wind.

That does not automatically explain what Osborn filmed over Anchorage almost nine years later. The two events are different times, places, and cameras: one military infrared, the other a civilian phone video taken during a rainbow photo stop. What they share is a shape that keeps pulling people in: a rounded body and trailing arms, hanging in the air just long enough to be recorded, then gone.

As of today, there is no public confirmation from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, and no independent analysis has settled what is in the Anchorage video. The footage circulating on X matches the scene in the Daily Mail report, including the rainbow and the dark shape over the trees, but the original files have not been independently authenticated here, and a conventional object has not been ruled out. For now, the honest version is the one Osborn herself offered. Something was there. Then it wasn't. And the sky over Anchorage, once again, has a jellyfish story attached to it.

Sources: Eric Deters (@bulllaw) on X, Nov. 10, 2026; Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) on X, Nov. 10, 2026; Daily Mail, "UFO with tentacles seen near US military base before vanishing"; IBTimes UK, "Jellyfish UFO Filmed Hovering Near Anchorage Base Before Vanishing, Witness Says," Nov. 10, 2026; AARO, "The Al Taqaddum Object" case resolution, Sept. 8, 2025; DVIDS, "Al Taqaddum Object".

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The Craft That Vanished When He Lifted the Goggles: An Air Force Guard Takes His UFO Story to the FBI

In a new interview on the Safe Aerospace Podcast, former Air Force security forces airman Logan Labby describes a large, silent V-shaped object that he and two fellow guards say drifted over Schriever Air Force Base near Colorado Springs in the spring of 2008. The twist? They could only see it through night-vision goggles. The moment Labby lowered them, the sky looked empty again. He later took the account to Americans for Safe Aerospace and the FBI, though the sighting itself remains unverified, and Labby has not claimed to know what the object was.

Watch the full interview on YouTube via Safe Aerospace Podcast.

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Twenty Years Since the Saucer Over Gate C-17: The O'Hare UFO That Punched a Hole in the Sky


Twenty years ago this past Saturday, one of the busiest airports on the planet had a visitor that never filed a flight plan. On a gray November afternoon in 2006, a dozen United Airlines employees at Chicago O'Hare looked up and saw something hovering over Gate C-17 that none of them could explain. Two decades later, it's still one of the most famous airport UFO sightings ever reported. Let's take a trip back to the tarmac.

A Routine Pushback

It was about 4:15 p.m. Central time on November 7, 2006. A ramp employee was pushing back United Airlines Flight 446, a Boeing 737 headed from Chicago to Charlotte, North Carolina. Nothing unusual about that. O'Hare handles that kind of thing all day long.

Then the ramp worker noticed something above the plane. Not a bird, not another jet, but what witnesses would later describe as a metallic, saucer-shaped craft hanging silently in the sky over the gate. The employee told Flight 446's crew about the object hovering above their aircraft.

The Radio Chatter Spreads

Here's where it gets good. Word spread over the radio, and people started running outside to look. According to the Chicago Tribune's Jon Hilkevitch, "The disc was visible for approximately five minutes and was seen by close to a dozen United Airlines employees, ranging from pilots to supervisors, who heard chatter on the radio and raced out to view it."

Pilots. Mechanics. Airline management. These aren't folks who get excited about a weather balloon. They look at the sky for a living.

Witnesses described the object as completely silent, dark gray, and somewhere between 6 and 24 feet across. A few independent witnesses outside the airport saw it too. One of them described a disc-shaped craft hovering over the airport and said it was "obviously not clouds."

The Hole in the Clouds

The detail that has kept this case alive for twenty years is what happened when the object left. According to that outside witness, it shot straight up at high speed and left a clear blue hole in the cloud layer, like someone had punched through a sheet of cotton. The hole reportedly closed itself up again a little while later.

A flying disc that leaves a hole in the sky on its way out? That's the kind of detail that sticks with you.

Nobody Saw It on Radar

Now for the twist. No air traffic controllers saw the object, and it didn't show up on radar. And at first, both United Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration said they didn't have any information about a sighting at all.

That changed when the Chicago Tribune, which was digging into the story, filed a Freedom of Information Act request. To comply, the FAA reviewed its air traffic communication tapes, and lo and behold, there was a call from a United supervisor to an FAA manager in the tower about the UFO.

The FAA's conclusion? A "weather phenomenon." Because of that, the agency said it would not be investigating. Some of the witnesses who spoke to the Tribune were reportedly upset that federal officials wouldn't look into it further.

The Skeptic's Explanation

To be fair to the FAA, there's a real weather explanation on the table. Astronomer Mark Hammergren pointed out that conditions that day were right for a "hole-punch cloud," an unusual but very real phenomenon where a round gap opens up in a cloud layer. If you've ever seen a photo of one, you know they look downright otherworldly.

It's also worth being honest about the messy parts. At least four of the eyewitness accounts on file don't agree on the shape, the height, the movement, the time, or even how many objects there were. That's not unusual for sightings, but it does make the story harder to pin down.

On the other side, UFO investigators argued that the FAA's refusal to dig in made no sense. Here was an object seen by numerous airport employees and officially reported by at least one of them, hanging in plain sight over one of the busiest airports in the world. Shouldn't that at least count as a possible safety or security issue?

From the Tarmac to Prime Time

The story exploded once the Tribune broke it on January 1, 2007. CNN, CBS, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR all picked it up. The History Channel's UFO Hunters covered it in a 2009 episode called "Aliens at the Airport," and it has shown up in shows like Hangar 1: The UFO Files and Ancient Aliens. It even got a nod in an episode of Boston Legal.

So What Was It?

Time for my speculation hat, and I want to be clear this part is just me wondering out loud. If it was a hole-punch cloud, then a dozen trained aviation workers saw a weird patch of sky and their brains filled in a saucer. That happens. But if it wasn't, then something silent and solid decided to park over a United gate at rush hour, waited five minutes, and then left through the ceiling. Honestly, if I were an alien trying to keep a low profile, O'Hare at 4 p.m. is the last place I'd pick. Maybe that was the point.

Twenty years on, we've got no radar track, no official investigation, and a story that refuses to go away. What do you think hovered over Gate C-17? Let me know in the comments.

Sources: Wikipedia, "2006 O'Hare International Airport UFO sighting," and the Chicago Tribune's reporting by Jon Hilkevitch ("In the sky! A bird? A plane? A ... UFO?", January 1, 2007).

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Monday, November 9, 2026

The Livingston Incident: The Only UFO Encounter Police Logged as an Assault

Forty-seven years ago this morning, a forestry worker walked his dog up a wooded hill in Scotland and came home with torn trousers, grazes on his chin and thighs, and one of the strangest stories in UFO history. It's the only alien encounter that police ended up logging as a criminal assault. Grab a cup of tea, because the Livingston Incident is a good one.

A Normal Friday in the Woods

On Friday, 9 November 1979, Robert "Bob" Taylor was doing his job. He'd worked in forestry for about 15 years, and at the time he was employed by the Livingston Development Corporation, the body building the new town of Livingston in West Lothian. That morning he parked his pickup truck by a road near the M8 motorway and headed up a forest path on the side of Dechmont Law with his red setter, Lara.

Around 10 a.m., he rounded a corner in the woods and stopped cold.

The Dome With Propellers

Hovering just above the forest floor in a clearing was something Taylor described as a "flying dome," roughly 7 yards (about 21 feet) across. It wasn't sleek or shiny like the saucers in the movies. According to his account, it was made of "a dark metallic material with a rough texture like sandpaper," and its outer rim was "set with small propellers."

Propellers! On a UFO! That detail alone makes this case stand out from almost every other sighting on record.

Then Things Got Weird

Two smaller spheres, which Taylor said looked "similar to sea mines," complete with spikes, dropped out and came rolling toward him. He said they latched onto his trousers and began dragging him toward the big dome. He noticed a foul smell "like burning brakes." And then he blacked out.

When he came to, Lara was barking furiously and the objects were gone. Taylor said he couldn't get his truck started, so he walked home to Livingston on foot.

The Police Get Involved

His wife, Mary, later said he arrived muddy and dishevelled, his clothes torn and his trousers ripped. She called the police and a doctor, who treated him for grazes to his chin and thighs.

Here's the part that makes this case legendary. Officers went back up Dechmont Law with Taylor and found "ladder-shaped marks" in the ground where he said the dome had hovered, plus other marks he said were made by the spiky little spheres. Because a man had been injured, the police recorded it as a criminal assault. That's why the Livingston Incident is so often called the only UFO sighting ever to become the subject of a criminal investigation.

The Skeptics Weigh In

Not everyone was ready to blame visitors from another world. UFO skeptic Steuart Campbell visited the site with police in 1979 and later noticed PVC pipes in a nearby field. The local water authority had been laying a cable duct within about 100 metres of the clearing, and he concluded that stacked pipes could have made the ground marks. He also suggested Taylor might have seen a mirage of the planet Venus.

Patricia Hannaford, a physician and founder of the Edinburgh University UFO Research Society, suggested Taylor may have had an isolated attack of temporal lobe epilepsy, with the objects being hallucinations. She pointed to his history of meningitis, the smell nobody else noticed, his headache, dry throat, the paralysis in his legs, and his blackout. Physicist Steve Donnelly of The Skeptic also leaned toward the epilepsy explanation. And in 2013, local businessman Phill Fenton speculated that Taylor may have had a mini-stroke, been exposed to harmful chemicals, and mistaken a nearby saucer-shaped water tower for a craft.

The Believers Hold Firm

On the other side, Scottish ufologist and author Malcolm Robinson has said he thinks "it could be one of the few genuine cases of a UFO encounter." And the town itself embraced the story. The Livingston Development Corporation agreed to put up a commemorative plaque, which was installed in January 1992, so the spot where it all happened is officially marked.

Bob Taylor died in March 2007 at age 88, and his story was big enough to earn obituaries in The Telegraph and The Economist.

So What Really Happened?

Here's where I'll put on my speculation hat, and I want to be clear this part is just me wondering out loud. If you were an alien civilization capable of crossing interstellar space, would you really show up in a dome with propellers and send out spiky balls to grab a forester by his trousers? It sounds less like a starship and more like a really bad day at a hardware store. But maybe that's exactly what makes it so compelling. Nobody making up a story would choose details that odd.

Whether it was a medical episode, a trick of the light, or something none of us can explain, the Livingston Incident still sits in a category of its own. A real man, real injuries, real police officers, and real marks in the dirt, all on a hillside in West Lothian, 47 years ago today.

What do you think Bob Taylor saw on Dechmont Law? Let me know in the comments.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Robert Taylor incident" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_incident) and History Scotland's "On this day: The Livingston UFO incident" (https://history.scot/the-livingston-ufo-incident/).

 

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