(NewsNation) — “UFO Witness” host Ben Hansen has interviewed a member of the flight crew that took evasive action during an alarming encounter with a “Tic Tac”-shaped projectile last year.
The incident reportedly occurred in February 2024 as a Department of Homeland Security flight spotted an object resembling a football at an altitude of 20,000 feet over California. The plane, a Beechcraft King Air 350C, banked one of its wings to avoid colliding with the UFO.
“It passed maybe 10 feet under our right wing,” the pilot of the plane tells an air traffic controller in an audio recording.
Hansen, whose show “UFO Witness” streams on Discovery+, said the pilot took evasive action because he thought the fast-moving object was a surface-to-air missile. When the crew attempted to track the object on radar, he said, they detected an object at the same altitude that appeared to skip back and forth in the sky.
“It’s like it’s playing hopscotch back and forth, and they have no idea what this is,” Hansen told “Banfield” on Wednesday.
He said the plane was unable to capture video of the UFO. Hansen worked with an animator to produce a video depicting the event.
“This object had no means of visible propulsion. There was no smoke, no streak, no anything, as it passes by,” Hansen said. “So, how is it flying? And, how is it going several times the speed of sound?”
The incident is reminiscent of a 2004 U.S. Navy encounter with a similar “Tic Tac” object that seemingly defied conventional flying abilities, he said.