American Airlines Flight 2292 and the "Long Cylindrical Object" over New Mexico

Sunday, 21 February 2021. American Airlines Flight 2292, an Airbus A320, was crossing the northeast corner of New Mexico on its way from Cincinnati to Phoenix. It was cruising at 36,000 feet and talking to Albuquerque Center. Below lay open country west of the town of Des Moines. In Amarillo, Texas, radio interceptor Steve Douglass was listening in.

Shortly after noon local time, a pilot came on the frequency. "Do you have any targets up here?" Then came the reason. "We just had something go right over the top of us." And: "I hate to say this but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing." It was "moving really fast right over the top of us."

No size. No colour. No sound. Just a shape, a speed and a pass directly overhead. What Douglass remembered was the voice. "I heard this aircraft, basically, above all other aircraft because the tone in his voice was so excited." The controller's reply never reached his recording. Amarillo air traffic control transmitted at the same moment and drowned it out.

Douglass posted a 15-second clip. Within days the story was on CBS, NBC and Global News, and The War Zone published the transcript. American Airlines first said it had no indication the call came from its crew. Then it talked to the crew and reversed itself. The airline confirmed that "this radio transmission was from American Airlines Flight 2292 on Feb. 21," and sent further questions to the FBI.

The FAA confirmed that a pilot had reported an object. "FAA air traffic controllers did not see any object in the area on their radarscopes." A Pentagon spokesman said no tests had run from White Sands Missile Range, about 400 miles away. White Sands added: "we never test in that area." A spokeswoman at Kirtland Air Force Base said: "We're not aware of anything."

Then came the paper chase. The Black Vault pursued the FAA through Freedom of Information requests. The first answer was a refusal. The second, in July 2021, was 6 pages. In December 2024 the FAA released the full audio, radar tracks and a radar replay video. One file name points to material withheld under a military exemption. A separate request by William Puckett of UFOs Northwest reportedly produced four redacted FBI pages that call the event a "bizarre close encounter."

On the Metabunk forum, Mick West and others went through the flight data. Their leading candidate was a Learjet 60 that passed about 5,000 feet above the airliner. An all-white Challenger 350 was another option. Retired airline pilot Keith Beachy suggested the crew could have mistaken a distant jet for a smaller, closer missile. The weak point is the timing. The Learjet's closest approach was logged 8 to 9 minutes before the call. The War Zone also looked at a secret aircraft and judged it unlikely, since such a craft would have been flying in daylight without talking to air traffic control.

The case echoes a 2018 encounter over southern Arizona, when a Learjet and another American Airlines jet reported something passing over them. Flight 2292 remains a single radio call, confirmed by the airline and the FAA. No photo. No radar return. No identification.