The Clayton UAP
A case for weird cylinders and "Tic-Tac" UFOs in the skies of the Southwest…
New Mexico is no stranger to unexplained sightings in its skies.
The infamous Roswell and Aztec crashes. The Lonnie Zamora incident in Socorro. The alien spaceport beneath Archuleta Mesa near Dulce. Hell, I’ve even seen some strange things in the skies of the Land of Enchantment myself (more on that later).
So I’d like to start things off with one of the more recent sightings, which happened in early 2021. Among other things, this was an officially reported incident, witnessed by an airline pilot and confirmed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In short, there aren’t too many UFO encounters that are better documented than this one.
Plus, the event took place after the renewed interest in UFO activity—really representing a sea change in the serious scientific and official acceptance of these phenomena—that followed the epochal 2017 article in the New York Times about the 2004 encounter between the USS Nimitz fighter pilots and the so-called “Tic-Tac” UAP (“Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon,” as the Pentagon brass now prefers, eschewing the pop-cultural and “fringe science” baggage of the more traditional term “UFO”).
There might even be a connection between that incident and the reported morphology of the object witnessed in northeast New Mexico, as we’ll shortly learn. So let’s dig into the incident itself, and see if we can’t figure out what’s going on.
On February 21, 2021, American Airlines Flight 2292—an Airbus A320—was about midway through a routine flight from Cincinnati to Phoenix, cruising through the northeast New Mexico skies at an altitude of 37,000 feet, a little west of the town of Clayton.
It was just another typical flight on a beautiful winter afternoon—until the Airbus was buzzed by something that had no business being in the same airspace, and resembled no form of aircraft the pilots were familiar with.
The only reason we know anything about this is because of investigative journalist, renowned “Stealth Chaser,” and experienced radio interceptor Steve Douglass, whose impressive array of scanners managed to pick up the transmission between Flight 2292’s pilot and the Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center. Douglass posted a recording of the transmission to his blog Deep Black Horizon, and it’s clear that the pilot was alarmed by the encounter.
“Do you have any targets up here? We just had something go right over the top of us that…I hate to say this, but it looked like a long, cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing—moving really fast, it went right over the top of us.”
The War Zone, a website that’s done yeoman’s work with its reporting on reputable UFO sightings and encounters, reached out to American Airlines and confirmed that the transmission was indeed from Flight 2292; the FAA also acknowledged the veracity of the encounter.
According to Steve Douglass, flight tracking software indicated that Flight 2292 was located in the northeast corner of New Mexico, not far from the town of Clayton. Although the pilot reported the object as resembling a “cruise missile,” there was no indication of military craft or weapons tests in the area; the FAA also confirmed that air traffic controllers hadn’t picked up any mysterious objects on their radarscopes.
There was no further investigation into the incident—at least none that was officially acknowledged and publicly released—and the identity of the object remains a mystery. Flight 2292 went on to land in Phoenix without further incident.
Verdict: What are we to make of this curious encounter?
For one thing, as The War Zone noted in their report on the incident, it bears a more than passing resemblance to a similar sighting near Tucson in March of 2018, in which two aircraft were buzzed by a very peculiar object. The pilots involved in this encounter concurred that their UFO was extremely bright and was moving at a high rate of speed; however, this is different from the Clayton Object, which was described as shaped like a cruise missile, with no mention of unusual brightness.
So, although the circumstances in these two incidents in the American Southwest are superficially similar, the actual objects involved seem to belong to two different species. Which begs the question: have similar phenomena to the Clayton Object been seen in the area?
Well, that’s where it starts to get interesting.
For one thing, there have been several recent sightings of so-called “Tic-Tac” UFOs…er, I suppose I should say UAPs, not far north of this part of New Mexico, near Colorado Springs—which is of course home to Peterson Space Force Base, for what it’s worth. One such object was caught on film near Divide, Colorado.
And although the pilot of Flight 2292 didn’t describe the object as a “Tic-Tac,” he did say it was a “long, cylindrical object,” and some of that perceived elongation may have been due to the thing’s high rate of speed.
According to Mysterious Universe, “Tic-Tacs” have been filmed near the location of another Space Force installation—this time Buckley Space Force Base, near Aurora, Colorado. And extremely fast-moving UFOs were caught on film by a local news crew over Denver back in 2012.
Are these objects otherworldly, or are they merely the latest iteration of novel military technology? Or is the answer somewhere in between? If these things do represent some new military drone or aerial wunderwaffen, their pilots or operators seem oddly unconcerned about violating air traffic regulations and risking a midair collision.
Maybe such mundane considerations are simply beneath their notice. One of the most interesting aspects of these phenomena is that they have no qualms about moving about during the daytime. Consider this description of a similar object witnessed by Christopher O’Brien, who spent decades chronicling the mysteries of the San Luis Valley and adjacent regions in southern Colorado.
In The Mysterious Valley, O’Brien describes a sighting that occurred in September of 1992, not far from the town of Gardner on the east side of the northern Sangre de Cristo Mountains:
“I was watching a series of steep piñon-covered hills to our left when something silver flashed between two of these low hills…The craft appeared to be about twelve feet long with tiny, stubby wings and I thought I might have seen a small clear cupola and a dark headrest and helmet. I’m not sure of this but that was my initial impression. That thing was really scooting along. In a matter of seconds, it had traveled far enough across the valley for me to lose sight of it against the mountain background.
“I thought it strange the way it appeared to move through the sky. It seemed to be pulled rather than propelled, as if it was on a string and was being quickly reeled in…”1
Not precisely the same as Flight 2292’s “cruise missile,” but we seem to be barking up the right tree. Add to that the fact that both encounters happened in the same general neck of the woods—the southern Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.
Finally, I’ll add a personal anecdote. In November of 2015, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I witnessed something that sounds awfully similar to both the Clayton Object and even Christopher O’Brien’s swiftly-moving UAP.
It was a bright, beautiful day, around 1:10 PM MDT, without a cloud in the sky, and I was driving on 599—the city’s truck relief route. After passing beneath an overpass, I just happened to look up into the sky, and I saw something inexplicable, which I still have trouble understanding and even explaining.
What I do remember is that it was an extremely fast-moving object, rather like O’Brien’s; in fact, it was moving so fast that I know that if I hadn’t serendipitously looked up at that precise moment I would never have noticed it. I’m also certain no one else on the road noticed it, since I recall looking around in disbelief to see if anyone else reacted to it. The whole episode happened so quickly that it could only have lasted a split second.
At any rate, the object—as near as I could tell—seemed to be a long cylinder, just like the thing seen by the pilot of Flight 2292; however, whether that was its real morphology, or just a visual artifact produced by its high speed, is impossible for me to say. I remember there was a greenish or bluish-green color, and a glinting light; then the thing was gone, as if it disappeared into the brilliant blue sky. Again, whether it truly disappeared, or simply moved so quickly that my eye couldn’t follow it, is not for me to say.
I see aircraft come in and out of the Santa Fe Airport every day; this was no airplane, and I’m almost certain it was moving at a speed no human occupant could have survived.
I’ve appended a recording I made shortly after the incident, for what it’s worth; it’s not a very articulate account of what happened, but in my defense I was pretty well baffled at the time by the whole episode, and was having difficulty making sense of it…as I still do today.
So what’s the verdict? Well, I can’t rightly say—but I’m absolutely certain there’s some strange class of aerial vehicle, human or otherwise, zipping around the skies of the American Southwest with gleeful abandon and little concern for the conventions of civil aviation. Sometimes I think the damned things are just showing off.
Are they visitors from another world? Are they a more evolved version of us, time-traveling to their past (our present) from whatever remote future age they hail from, as Dr. Michael P. Masters hypothesizes in his book Identified Flying Objects? Are they representatives of a “breakaway civilization”—a very advanced but still very human civilization that exists secretly and in parallel to our own—as theorized by UFO researcher Richard Dolan? Or are they just hotshot test pilots experimenting with the latest military technology—whether homegrown or reverse engineered from otherworldly sources?
For the time being, the answers to those questions remain elusive; meanwhile, the sightings continue with no sign of letting up anytime soon.
One last thing: based on the descriptions of these objects, as well as how incredibly fast they are (which I can personally confirm), there seems to be a family resemblance to the “Tic-Tacs” and other UAPs reported by Navy pilots.
I wonder if there’s a connection…
Christopher O’Brien, The Mysterious Valley (New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 1996), pp. 54-5.