The Bovina Encounter
An alien mothership, or just a bunch of “celestial bodies”…?
Here’s something important that you need to know about the American West: aliens just can’t get enough of the place.
That shouldn’t come as a great surprise to any halfway competent ufologist who’s up to date on the latest research on Roswell, Area 51, the Dulce Base, the Aztec and Kingman crashes, and the Phoenix Lights.
But one of the most fascinating aspects of this phenomenon is the penchant for UFOs to buzz, menace, shadow, and otherwise scare the living daylights out of commercial airline pilots. In fact, we caught a glimpse of this trend in an earlier article about the Clayton UAP.
That incident occurred in the northeast corner of New Mexico in 2021, but an equally intriguing encounter happened a little further to the south, nearly twenty-six years earlier, close to the town of Bovina, Texas, across the line from Clovis, New Mexico.
This is the so-called “Cactus 564” UFO Incident—or Bovina Encounter, if you prefer—and it remains one of the most perplexing and well-documented UFO sightings on record.
The incident occurred on the night of May 25, 1995, when Cactus 564—an America West flight that had originated in Tampa, and was now completing the final leg of its flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Las Vegas, Nevada—was passing over West Texas and crossing into New Mexico at a cruising altitude of about 39,000 feet.
Flight 564 was a standard Boeing 757, captained by Eugene Tollefson, and with First Officer John J. Waller in the copilot’s seat. So far so good, but it was around 9:25 PM Mountain Time that things began to get a little dicey in Flight 564’s cockpit.
As the story goes, the lead flight attendant was admiring the pyrotechnics display put on by a massive thunderhead off to the northeast—a common enough sight on the Texas plains that time of year. What the flight attendant saw next, however, wasn’t common at all.
Simply put, it was a series of lights that were flashing in a regular and repeating pattern; they were off to the north, somewhere between Flight 564 and the thunderhead, and a little below the aircraft in terms of altitude. That last is an interesting detail that we’ll have reason to recall a little later.
Anyhow, First Officer John J. Waller was alerted to the unusual objects, and he observed them as well, noting that they comprised a sequence of eight lights, said to be extremely bright and a whitish-blue in color, that flashed on and off in a regular sequence or pattern from left to right. The altitude of the lights was estimated to be between 30,000 to 35,000 feet.
His curiosity piqued, Capt. Tollefson decided to have a look at what was causing all the commotion among his crew; he left his seat to catch a better glimpse of the lights, but upon seeing the sequentially flashing objects, he noticed something even more astonishing—the flashes of lighting in the thunderhead seemed to reveal that the lights were not individual objects at all, but rather belonged to a single massive craft. Silhouetted against the electric innards of the thundercloud was what looked for all the world to be a giant, dark, cigar-shaped object whose size was estimated to be somewhere between three hundred to five hundred feet long.
It’s safe to say that at this point Cactus 564’s flight crew was very interested in what they were seeing.
After about five minutes of observing this truly colossal UFO (or UAP, in today’s updated jargon), First Officer Waller contacted the Albuquerque FAA Air Route Traffic Control Center to try to get some idea of what it was they were seeing—and that set off a flurry of back-and-forth communications between Cactus 564, Air Traffic Control in Albuquerque, Cannon Air Force Base (in Clovis, New Mexico), NORAD, and what was later revealed to be an F-117A Nighthawk skulking around in the vicinity.
The transcripts of this conversation, as obtained by Walter N. Webb of the UFO Research Coalition during the course of his detailed investigation of the incident, are highly revealing, not to say entertaining.
You can also listen to the original recordings for yourself in the video below.1
The first transmission comes in at 9:29 PM, when Flight 564 contacts Albuquerque to report the object:
ABQ: “Cactus 564, go ahead.”
AW-564: “Yeah, off to our three o’clock, got some strobes out there. Could you tell us what it is?”
ABQ: “Uh…I’ll tell you what, that’s some, uh…right now…I don’t know what it is right now. That is a restricted area that’s, uh, used by the military out there during the day time.”
AW-564: “Yeah…it’s pretty odd.”
ABQ: “Hold on…let me see if anybody else knows around here.”
About a minute later, Flight 564 contacts Albuquerque again:
AW-564: “Cactus 564…can you paint that object at all [on the radar]?”
ABQ: “Cactus 564…no I don’t, and in talkin’ to three or four guys around here no one knows what that is, never heard about that.”
AW-564: “So nobody’s painting it at all?”
ABQ: “Cactus 564 say again?”
AW-564: “I said there’s nothing on their radars, on the other centers at all on that particular area…that object that’s up in the air?”
ABQ: “Uh…it’s up in the air?”
AW-564: “A-FFIRMATIVE!!”
ABQ: “No…no one knows anything about it. What’s the altitude about?”
AW-564: “I don’t know, probably right around 30,000 or so. And it’s, uh…there’s a strobe that starts…um, going, uh, counterclockwise, and, uh…the length is unbelievable.”
The next communication, at 9:31 PM, is between the Albuquerque FAA controller and Cannon Air Force Base:
ABQ: “Cannon 21?”
CANNON: “Cannon—go ahead.”
ABQ: “Hey, do you guys know if there was anything like a tethered balloon or anything released that should be above Taiban?”2
CANNON: “Uh, no, we haven’t heard nothin’ about it.”
(BOTH): “Uh, ok…(some chuckling), uh, ha…”
ABQ: “A guy at 39,000 says he sees something at 30,000 and the length is unbelievable and it has a strobe on it.”
CANNON: “Uh huh…?”
ABQ: “This is not good…”
CANNON: “Uh, wha…what does that mean?”
ABQ: “(Laughing) I don’t know, it’s a UFO or something…it’s that Roswell crap again!”
CANNON: “Where’s it at now?”
ABQ: “He says it’s right in Taiban.”
CANNON: “It’s right in Taiban? No, we haven’t seen nothin’ like that.”
ABQ: “Okay, keep your eyes open.”
“Roswell crap again” indeed. Albuquerque then contacts Flight 564 again:
ABQ: “Cactus 564…we checked with Cannon and they don’t have any, uh, weather balloons or anything up tonight. Nobody up front knows any idea about that. Do you still see it?”
AW-564: “Negative…back where we initially spotted it it was between the weather and us and when there’s lightning you could see a dark object…and, uh, it was pretty eerie looking…”
[…]
ABQ: “Okay.”
AW-564: “First time in 15 years I’ve ever seen anything like this. It’s probably military in that restricted area.”
The next conversation is between Albuquerque and what turned out to be an F-117A Nighthawk with the 49th Fighter Wing out of Holloman Air Force Base, answering to the call sign “Hawk 85”:
ABQ: “Hawk 85, in the next two to three minutes, be looking off to your right side…if you see anything about 30,000 feet, we had one aircraft reporting something…it wasn’t a weather balloon or anything. It was a long, white-looking thing with a strobe on it. Let me know if you see anything out there.”
Hawk 85: “You got any traffic off our left wing right now?”
ABQ: “I’ve got something passing off your 9:00 in about 12 at 31 westbound…”
Hawk 85: “It actually looks like something about a little lower than us just went off our left wing.”
Finally, after Cactus 564 lost sight of the UFO, Albuquerque contacted the Western Air Defense Sector Headquarters of North American Air Defense (NORAD) at McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington—and that fact alone should indicate that, despite the witty banter and nervous laughter, the Albuquerque FAA controller took the matter seriously enough to exhaust all appropriate military channels:
ABQ: “Bigfoot [apparently NORAD’s call sign—you can’t make this stuff up!]…Albuquerque Sector 87.”
BIGFOOT: “Bigfoot’s on!”
ABQ: “Yeah…I’ve got a, uh, something unusual and I was wanting to know if y’all happen to know of anything going on out here around Tucumcari, New Mexico…north of Cannon? I had a couple of aircraft reported something 300-400 foot long…cylindrical in shape, with a strobe flashing off to the end of it.”
BIGFOOT: “Oh..?”
ABQ: “At 30,000 feet.”
BIGFOOT: “Okay…hang on a second.”
ABQ: “Yeah, I didn’t know if you happen to know of anything going on out there…no balloons in the area, no nothing reported?”
BIGFOOT: “Okay, where’s this at again?”
ABQ: “It’s at, uh, well you know where…it’s in Tucumcari, New Mexico, it’s about 150 miles to the east of Albuquerque.”
BIGFOOT: “Okay, how far from Holloman?”
ABQ: “Holloman, it looks like it’s off the zero-three-zero off Holloman about 220 miles.”
BIGFOOT: “Okay…I think, okay…it’s kinda hard for us to see here. Okay, they’ll be zero for about 200. Um…we don’t have anything going on over there that I know of.”
ABQ: “Yeah…I didn’t know, we’ve tried everybody else and nobody else is…this guy definitely saw it run all the way down the side of the airplane. Said it was a pretty interesting thing out there.”
BIGFOOT: “Okay, it was at 30,000 feet?”
ABQ: “…30,000 feet.”
BIGFOOT: “It was like..long…um…”
ABQ: “Yeah, it’s right out of, it’s right out of the X-Files. I mean it’s a…it’s a definite UFO or something like that, I mean…”
BIGFOOT: “…and…it…oh…ya’ll are serious about this (laughing)…”
ABQ: “Yeah, he’s real serious about that too, and…uh…he looked at, saw it, no balloons are reported tonight, nothing in the area…”
BIGFOOT: “It was strobing off the front he said?”
ABQ: “Uh…I think the strobe was off the tail end of it.”
BIGFOOT: “Okay…‘strobe tail end.’”
ABQ: “He said it was kinda, well it was dark but…(aside to someone else: ‘did he say there was lights in it?’)”
BIGFOOT: “How long did he say it was?”
ABQ: “He said it was 300-400 foot long.”
BIGFOOT: “Holy smokes!!”
At the time, NORAD didn’t detect anything unusual; several minutes later, however, they called Albuquerque to confirm that they had indeed discovered an unknown radar signature in the area. This proved upon further investigation to be simply a small plane with an unresponsive or inoperative transponder.
Nevertheless, Walter Webb of the UFO Research Coalition said that the Albuquerque Control Center air traffic controller claimed he had checked in with NORAD again the following morning, and received a very interesting bit of intelligence. Apparently, they had tracked another object in that area shortly after Cactus 564’s sighting—and this was definitely no small aircraft with an unresponsive transponder.
According to the air traffic controller, NORAD had detected a large, stationary object that accelerated to high speeds and then stopped abruptly several times; its velocity during these brief bursts was clocked at somewhere between 1,000-1,400 miles per hour.
Unfortunately, this information was entirely anecdotal, and Webb could not confirm it with NORAD. In a development that should come as no surprise to anyone, the government remains mum on the whole Cactus 564 UFO Incident.3
Verdict: So what really happened on that stormy May night near Bovina, Texas, way back in 1995?
Honestly, none of the investigations have turned up a satisfactory explanation. There is, I think it goes without saying, something extremely compelling and even ominous in that evocative imagery of a gigantic, cylindrical dark object with strobing lights lurking over the Texas plains, its immense bulk backlit and silhouetted by intermittent flashes of lightning from a massive thunderstorm.
What the hell was the thing?
Well, for starters, it’s no secret that cigar-shaped UFOs are one of the most common shapes for these inexplicable objects. After all, the so-called “oldest-known UFO picture,” taken sometime in the winter of 1870-71, is said to depict a cigar-shaped object darting among the clouds above Mount Washington in New Hampshire. And don’t even get me started on the “Airship Scare” that engulfed the United States in the late 1890s, and which began in the Southwest—including just that part of eastern New Mexico and western Texas where the Bovina Encounter occurred.
Most descriptions of those objects involved something unquestionably cigar-shaped. But if there’s any connection between the two, then the Bovina Object is undoubtedly the big bother to those earlier UFOs—and by big, I mean big. At 300-500 feet long, the object witnessed over the Texas-New Mexico line is the mother of all cigar-shaped UFOs. At that size, it has much more in common with the Japan Airlines Flight 1628 Incident over Alaska, in which the captain reported seeing a UFO the size of “two aircraft carriers.” Now the Bovina Object wasn’t exactly that big, but it was big enough; if the air traffic controller’s conversation with NORAD on the following day was accurate and truthful, the fact that it may have been capable of accelerating to enormous speeds and then stopping on a dime is even more remarkable.
That behavior sounds an awful lot like the “Tic-Tac” UFOs witnessed by Cmdr. Dave Fravor and others on the USS Nimitz in 2004, only this time it involved a much larger and more intimidating craft. As we saw with the Clayton UAP, cylindrical UFOs aren’t all that uncommon in this part of the American West; what’s most unusual about the Bovina Object is its sheer size.
Who knows? Perhaps it’s a kind of “mothership” to all those smaller craft—something rather like the giant, shape-shifting object seen in the Centaurus Incident of 1954, one of whose many shapes, incidentally, was also something very like a cigar.
First Officer John J. Waller made a sketch of what he saw that night (see image above), and the object it depicts is a dead ringer for some other UFOs encountered from time to time.
For instance, it bears an uncanny resemblance to an object witnessed near Montgomery, Alabama, by two Eastern Airlines pilots in 1948—the so-called “Chiles-Whitted UFO Encounter.” It was described by one of the pilots as “about 100 feet long, cigar-shaped and wingless, about twice the diameter of a B-29 with no protruding fins;” all the passengers on the flight were asleep at the time, save one, who also saw the object, and said it “looked like a cigar with a cherry flame going out the back. There was a row of windows…It disappeared very quickly.”4
The following year, and much nearer geographically to the Bovina Encounter, the famous astronomer Clyde Tombaugh (the discoverer of Pluto) had his own sighting of a UFO near Las Cruces, New Mexico. What he saw was a “geometrical group of faint bluish-green rectangles of light”—which is sometimes depicted as forming elements of a cigar-shaped object, as in the illustration below.
After a little sleuthing, I also learned that the area of Texas and New Mexico where the Bovina Encounter occurred has had more than its fair share of unusual UFO activity—including one sighting that took place only a few weeks later.
According to one account posted on the site UFO Hunters, the witness saw a gigantic, this time triangle-shaped object near Tucumcari, New Mexico, to the northwest of Bovina, on the night of June 15, 1995. Intriguingly, this encounter also involved a thunderstorm:
“My friend and I were returning from a fishing trip and had just passed through Tucumcari heading south on highway 209 shortly before sunset. There was a strong thunderstorm about 2 miles east of the highway that had some of the most violent lightning that I’ve ever seen. I was riding as the passenger in my friend’s Mustang when I noticed a light just west of the storm and well above it. At first I thought that it was the moon, but then I saw the moon on the other side of the car. Upon further inspection the light was actually three separate round lights in a perfect triangular formation. The lights did not appear to be separate objects, but part of a larger triangle shaped object. There was no variation at all in their relation to each other. At this point I told my friend about it and he wanted to see it too…We took turns looking at the object and driving for about 2 minutes before the thunderstorm blocked it from our view. The object appeared to be moving very slowly and steadily with the storm and maintained its position relative to the storm the entire time that we viewed it. After we had both confirmed the object we were both excited and fearful at the same time. This object was truly awesome to witness due to its immense size and rock steady trajectory. It was obvious that this was not some sort of freak weather event or some type of aircraft (or even several aircraft in formation). It was moving very methodically and with what seemed like purpose, definitely not random at all…This object was immense, and unlike any aircraft that we had ever seen (in size or movement). Based on the high altitude that the object was at and the distance between the three lights, this object had to be hundreds of yards across. It was not moving fast enough to be an aircraft either. I seriously doubt that we have any technology that is capable of making an object that large fly. This object would have dwarfed even a C-5.”
Was there something lurking in the skies over the Texas-New Mexico line in the late spring of 1995, using the area’s ubiquitous thunderstorms as cover? Or maybe the thunderstorms are entirely incidental, and have nothing to do with it at all; maybe the real draw was Cannon Air Force Base. There have been plenty of UFO sightings near Clovis over the years, including a daytime sighting as long ago as 1944, another cigar-shaped object seen in 2011, and even another sighting over Bovina nearly a year after the first one.
Well…maybe someone, or something, piloting a truly colossal cylinder-shaped vessel, likes to nose around West Texas and eastern New Mexico every once in a while. Maybe they’re interested in what the folks at Cannon AFB are doing; maybe they just like the local meteorological phenomena.
Hell, it could even be some top secret technology the government’s cooked up at Area 51 or Area 52 or some such place…but if that’s true, it means Uncle Sam’s fielding some pretty enormous stuff these days—something like an aircraft carrier of the skies.
I guess that’s certainly possible, but I’d love to know how it’s done.
So that leaves me with the final possibility, though I’m reluctant to even mention it. This theory posits that what the flight crew of Cactus 564 saw was…the planet Venus. Well, perhaps not Venus exclusively, but what essentially amounts to the same thing—the theory is that they witnessed “celestial bodies” (planets, presumably), which we’re told have a tendency to “strobe” just like the Bovina UFO.
Honestly, some days I think these “debunkers” are just phoning it in.
Needless to say, I’m unconvinced. Recall that the lights were seen at an altitude below Flight 564, that there were eight of them, and that they were visible between the aircraft and the distant thunderstorm. Those would have to be some magic planets to pull that trick off; besides, the lights were seen to the northeast—what planet would appear in that direction, and so low on the horizon?
Still, I suppose it’s better than being told it was a weather balloon…after all, these days Uncle Sam’s become so damned trigger-happy he’s taken to blowing even his favorite go-to UFO cover story out of the skies.
Or so I’ve heard. Funny how they still can’t seem to recover the debris…
If you have the stomach for it, you can watch this brief rundown of that rather embarrassingly flimsy theory from the Smithsonian Channel’s UFOs Declassified.
As for me, I think that’s a bunch of hogwash…but then again, what do I know? Anyhow, that’s all I’ve got for today; if you have any thoughts about this incident, or have seen similar objects in the Texas-New Mexico borderlands or anywhere at all for that matter, please let us all know in the comments.
I promise not to accuse you of mistaking a strobing, cigar-shaped celestial body for a genuine UFO…
You can also find additional rare audio from the incident here:
This is presumably the Taiban Military Operations Area (MOA) restricted airspace near Cannon Air Force Base.
In From Adam to Omega, author Allen Roberts sums up the perplexing nature of the government’s response in his discussion of the Bovina Encounter:
“NORAD later denied the whole thing. But why? It seems rather pointless considering that documentation and recordings of the incident exist and have been made public. But denial appears to be standard procedure by the government and the military in such cases. If what the crew of America West 564 saw was some new type of top-secret aircraft, then there would be justification for secrecy. But if that was the case, why didn’t NORAD block the information from being released through the FOIA? It makes no sense. Considering that records exist proving the authenticity of the event, official denial only generates more controversy and is yet another reason to suspect disinformation” (Allen Roberts, From Adam to Omega: An Anatomy of UFO Phenomena [Bloomington, IL: iUniverse, 2020]).
Mysteries of the Unexplained (Pleasantville, New York/Montreal: The Reader’s Digest Association, 1982), pg. 225.