by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.” & a new book to be released!
Just this week, video of a UFO taken by a passenger on a plane coming in for a landing at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York, made international news. Video footage of UFOs constantly appears online and more often than not leads to a dead end for researchers trying to identify witnesses or turns out to be faked. In this case, not only was the witness identified, but she appeared on News Nation for an interview, along with a researcher looking into the case who considered the video to be authentic.
The witness is Michelle Reyes, who was capturing video of the New York skyline while sitting next to her daughter, who had the window seat. The Verrazano Bridge is centered in the frame as a black, elongated, oval-shaped UFO goes whizzing by from right to left, which in this case is northeast to southwest. Reyes posted the video on Facebook, and researcher/investigator Ben Hansen (who was a guest on PodcastUFO on February 16, 2021) managed to find her and interview her.
They appeared together on the April 24, 2024 News Nation episode of Banfield and Reyes told her story to host Ashleigh Banfield. The video is shown and Banfield welcomes Reyes and Hansen and after commenting that “that was pretty alarming stuff,” asks Reyes what she did with the video and if she reached out “to authorities to share it with them.”
Reyes answers that the first thing she did when she realized what she had caught was to email the FAA to alert them to a possible safety hazard. She says that she hadn’t heard back from them and received no acknowledgement of her email. She says that the next step she took was to send the video to Enigma Labs and The UFO Database (Enigma Labs has what it calls “The Global UFO Sightings Database”). She says that Enigma Labs was the only organization that responded to her.
Banfield brings up the fact that Reyes’s father is “a former Navy guy” and asks what he had to say when Reyes showed him the video. Reyes says, “He was just as baffled as I was.” Banfield asks if the best guess was that it might have been a drone, and Reyes says her father thought it might have been, but that if it was, it shouldn’t have been so close to the aircraft.
Banfield then turns to Hansen and asks him what he thinks of “this Tic-Tac video.” Hansen replies ‘This is incredible, honestly.” He then describes the difficulty his group had getting in touch with Reyes as someone had taken her video and posted it as if they were a friend of hers. He says that when they finally got in touch with her, he found her to be genuine and sincere and that, after analysis of the video, they found no evidence that she faked it.
According to Hansen, while it might have been speculated to be an insect, what Reyes caught was probably not too far away, and he describes that it passes by at about 1/7 of a second and appears in 5 frames of the video. Banfield remarks that if it is an insect, it’s big, shiny, and fast. She says it looks “like the Tic-Tacs we’ve seen in other naval videos as well.”
Banfield asks if anyone else aboard the plane had seen the UFO and Reyes says that “one of the other moms” commented on her, Reyes’s, social media site (Twitter/X according to the Hindustan Times) that she had noticed it as well.
As opposed to making a joke out the sighting, as often happens on news reports when it comes to the UFO subject, Banfield says she’s sorry that Reyes didn’t get the attention from authorities that she should have.
Sidenote: Even though “when” is one of the basic elements of journalism, finding the date of the incident took a bit of clicking. An article by Noam Laden headlined “UFO Spotted Over LaGuardia Airport” posted April 26, 2024, on the 77 WABC website has it as March 25th.
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