Unknown

The Man in the Wingsuit Over the LAX Approach (14 June 2026)

Airspace east of Los Angeles International Airport, over the Downey and Santa Fe Springs area, Los Angeles County, California · 14 June 2026 · Aviation encounter · United States

THIS IS NOT THE OBJECT REPORTED IN JUNE 2026. No imagery of the 14 June 2026 wingsuit sighting exists. This is a real frame from Los Angeles Police Department helicopter video shot in early November 2020, showing a human-shaped inflatable balloon floating thousands of feet above the Holmby Hills and Beverly Hills areas. Officials and journalists identified it as a life-sized Jack Skellington airwalker balloon from Tim Burton's 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas. The balloon was never recovered and was never linked to any pilot sighting, but it is the physical basis of the FBI and FAA working theory that pilots in this series may have seen balloons. (Los Angeles Police Department, obtained and published by NBC4 Los Angeles and NBC News, 1 November 2021)

"Are you serious?" the controller asked, after the crew of a military Gulfstream on final approach to Los Angeles International Airport reported that somebody in a wingsuit had just crossed above them at 4,000 feet.

What did witnesses see at Airspace east of Los Angeles International Airport?

Sunday 14 June 2026 was an unremarkable afternoon on the eastern arrival corridor into Los Angeles International Airport until an American military Gulfstream told the tower it had just been overflown by a person. The aircraft was a Special Air Mission jet using the callsign SAM741, the callsign block operated out of Joint Base Andrews for government and senior official transport. NBC4 Los Angeles reported that the flight had come from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas that morning, then departed Nellis for LAX at 1:50 pm, and that the sighting occurred within ten minutes of the jet landing. The Los Angeles Times described the aircraft simply as a military transport Gulfstream jet.

The Los Angeles Times, which reviewed audio it credited to ATC.com, reported the crew's first transmission as a report that they "just had a potential skydiver around 4,000 feet." Air traffic control, in the paper's words, responded with evident surprise and asked for clarification. "We just had somebody cross above us around 4,000 feet in a wingsuit," the pilot answered. "Are you serious?" the controller asked, before warning an American flight that was next in line to land. "We're looking for him," the American pilot answered. NBC4 Los Angeles independently quoted the same central line from the recording, that the SAM741 pilot "just had somebody cross above us around 4,000 feet in a wingsuit."

A fuller transcription of the same audio was published on 15 June 2026 by Joe Kovacs at WorldNetDaily, taken from a clip circulated by the air traffic monitoring account Thenewarea51, which credited the recording to the ATC app. That transcription timestamps the exchange at 2:33 pm Pacific and runs: "On approach, SAM 741 just had a potential skydiver around 4,000 feet." "What was that?" "Uh, SAM 741 we just had somebody cross above us around 4,000 feet in a wingsuit." "Are you SERIOUS?" "Affirm, sir." "American 2041, did you copy that?" "We did. We're looking for him." That version supplies the identity of the second aircraft, American Airlines 2041, which the Times reported only as an American flight. The archive was not able to obtain the raw recording itself, and LiveATC.net's public archive does not reach back to June 2026, so the Los Angeles Times and NBC4 wordings are the better attested and the WorldNetDaily transcription is the fuller but less authoritative of the two.

The times reported for the event vary by a few minutes across sources, which matters less than it looks. The Los Angeles Times put the sighting at around 2:40 pm shortly before landing. WorldNetDaily's transcription is stamped 2:33 pm. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department told NBC4 and the New York Post that its Air Bureau received a report from SoCal TRACON, the Federal Aviation Administration approach control facility for Southern California, of a possible skydiver in the area west of the 605 Freeway and north of the 105 Freeway at about 2:30 pm. Those are all consistent with a single event in the middle of the 2:30 pm hour: a pilot report, a controller relaying it, and a sheriff's watch commander logging the call.

That geography is the most concrete detail in the whole file. West of the 605 and north of the 105 puts the reported object over Downey, Santa Fe Springs and the surrounding suburbs, roughly fifteen or sixteen miles east of the runway thresholds at LAX, which is exactly where an arriving jet is stepping down through 4,000 feet on the eastern feed to the airport. The Sheriff's Department launched a helicopter to the area. Deputies were unable to locate anyone by the time it arrived. Other pilots in the sequence were warned.

What does not exist is as important as what does. Nobody photographed or filmed the object. No radar return has been published. No parachute canopy was reported by anyone on the ground in one of the most densely populated suburban basins in the United States. No jump aircraft was reported. No injured or dead parachutist turned up. No arrest was announced. The entire evidentiary record of the 14 June 2026 event is a few seconds of radio traffic between professionals and the absence of anything the search found.

More footage and images of this sighting

14 CFR Part 105, Parachute Operations, the federal rule that would govern any lawful wingsuit or parachute flight in the LAX terminal area View source

FAA Advisory Circular 105-2E, Sport Parachuting, 4 December 2013 View source

What is the official explanation?

The official response in the first hours was operational rather than investigative, and it is worth separating the two. SoCal TRACON passed the report to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, whose Air Bureau launched a helicopter and searched the area west of the 605 Freeway and north of the 105 Freeway without finding anyone. Controllers warned the next arrival in the sequence. The Federal Aviation Administration told NBC4 Los Angeles and the New York Post that it was investigating. The Los Angeles Times reported that the FAA did not immediately respond to its request for comment. As of the compiling of this file the FAA has published no finding, named no object, and issued no explanation for the 14 June 2026 report.

There is no National Transportation Safety Board file, because there was no accident and no reportable incident. Nothing was struck, no aircraft was damaged, and no injury occurred. The NTSB has no jurisdictional hook here at all, which is a point worth making plainly rather than leaving as an implied absence: the only federal paper trail this kind of event generates is an FAA one.

NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System is the other documentary avenue, and it is a limited one. ASRS describes itself as the world's largest repository of voluntary, confidential safety information provided by aviation's frontline personnel, including pilots, controllers, mechanics, flight attendants and dispatchers. Its reports are de-identified before publication, and NASA states on the database's own front page that "NASA ASRS does not verify or validate reports and therefore we are not in a position to confirm the details presented in ASRS reports." The archive could not query the ASRS database for this event; its search interface is not reachable by simple retrieval, and any matching report would in any case have been stripped of the callsign, the date and the location that would let it be tied to this sighting. No public ASRS record can be matched to 14 June 2026 at this time.

The regulatory frame is the part of the official record that is fully documented, and it cuts against the literal reading of the pilot's report. Parachute operations in the United States are governed by 14 CFR Part 105. Section 105.25(a)(2) states that no person may conduct a parachute operation, and no pilot in command may allow one to be conducted from that aircraft, "Within or into a Class A, B, C, D airspace area without, or in violation of the requirements of, an air traffic control authorization issued under this section." LAX sits at the centre of Class B airspace and the reported object was inside the terminal area worked by SoCal TRACON. Section 105.21(a) separately requires an FAA certificate of authorization for any parachute operation "over or into a congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or an open-air assembly of persons." Section 105.15(a) sets out what such a request must contain, including the exit altitude, the drop zone radius, the duration, the registration number of the aircraft to be used, and the name of the air traffic control facility with jurisdiction over the airspace at the first intended exit altitude. The FAA's own advisory circular on the subject, AC 105-2E, opens by stating that "The FAA's primary responsibility with respect to skydiving is the protection of air traffic and persons and property on the ground. Part 105 was developed to accomplish this task." In other words, a lawful wingsuit flight through the LAX arrival corridor at 4,000 feet would have been known to the very controller who asked "Are you serious?"

The deeper official record belongs to the earlier sightings this one revived. The FAA confirmed the first on the record within two days. Ian Gregor, Communications Manager for the FAA Pacific Division, said in 2020: "Two airline flight crews reported seeing what appeared to be someone in a jet pack as they were on their final approaches to LAX around 6:35 p.m. PDT Sunday. The FAA alerted local law enforcement to the reports, and is looking into these reports." The FBI opened an inquiry. More than a year later, on 1 November 2021, after NBC4 Los Angeles obtained Los Angeles Police Department helicopter video and photographs of a human-shaped inflatable floating over Beverly Hills, the Bureau and the FAA issued the line that has defined the case ever since: "One working theory is that pilots might have seen balloons." The FAA added: "The FAA has worked closely with the FBI to investigate every reported jetpack sighting. So far, none of these sightings have been verified." Officials told NBC4 that after more than a year of investigation federal agents had been unable to find additional witnesses who saw, or recorded video of, any of the reported objects either in flight or falling to the ground. Both agencies said the inquiry remained open.

The FAA repeated the same formula almost word for word after the next sighting, on Thursday 23 June 2022, in a statement carried by CBS Los Angeles: "An airline pilot reported seeing an object that might have resembled a jetpack 15 miles east of Los Angeles international Airport around 2:45 p.m. today (Thursday). The FAA has worked closely with the FBI to investigate every reported jetpack sighting. So far, none of these sightings have been verified. One working theory is that pilots might have seen balloons." That is the last substantive official word on the series before June 2026.

The balloon theory deserves precise handling, because the press flattened it. What the LAPD actually recorded, according to NBC4's investigative report by Eric Leonard, was captured in early November 2020 by two officers on a routine patrol flight near the Hollywood Hills, roughly two weeks after the second pilot sighting, and shows a human-shaped inflatable floating thousands of feet above the Holmby Hills and Beverly Hills areas. CBS Los Angeles, which ran the images under the headline that the jet pack man sighting "Was" a Jack Skellington balloon, described the footage as showing the balloon's skeleton face clearly along with the black suit and bowtie, identifying it as the lead character of Tim Burton's 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas. That identification is a visual match made by officers and journalists looking at a low resolution frame. The balloon was never recovered, never traced to an owner, and never linked to any pilot report. NBC4's own wording was careful throughout: the police encounter "could have been" a single balloon from a Halloween display that broke loose, and it "emboldened" a theory. It was never presented by the FAA or the FBI as a solved identification of any particular sighting, and it has never been shown that any pilot saw that object or one like it.

What did the witnesses think it was?

The witnesses in this case are not amateurs and not anonymous in the usual sense. They are a military flight crew operating a government Gulfstream on an instrument approach, a Federal Aviation Administration controller working LAX arrivals, and the flight deck of a scheduled American Airlines jet in the landing sequence behind them. Their testimony was given in real time on a recorded frequency, in the middle of a task with no room for showing off, and it was acted upon operationally within seconds.

What the SAM741 crew believed is legible from the words they chose. Their first call hedged, offering "a potential skydiver." When the controller pushed back, the crew did not soften the report, they sharpened it: "somebody" crossed above them, at around 4,000 feet, "in a wingsuit." Asked outright whether they were serious, they answered "Affirm, sir." They named a garment, not a machine. No one in the 2026 exchange said jetpack, jet man, rocket pack or drone. Whatever they saw read to them as a human being wearing a wingsuit, and they were willing to say so on a recorded frequency to a controller who had just expressed open disbelief.

The controller's reaction is itself testimony. Controllers hear odd traffic calls constantly and have a professional vocabulary for handling them. "Are you serious?" is not that vocabulary. The controller then did the two things a controller does when a report is credible enough to act on: passed a traffic warning to the next arrival, and pushed the report to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department through SoCal TRACON, which put a helicopter in the air. The American 2041 crew accepted the warning at face value and answered "We did. We're looking for him." Three separate professional parties treated the report as an operational hazard in the moment. None of them treated it as a joke.

Buzz Patterson, a pilot and author who carried the presidential emergency satchel during the Clinton administration, was among those who circulated the audio and wrote of it: "An Air Force jet on final sees a guy in a wingsuit ABOVE them. I've seen a lot of things in my 35 years in the air, but I've never seen this! Volume up!" That is a reaction rather than an analysis, but it registers how the exchange landed inside the aviation community.

Behind this crew stands a line of professional witnesses stretching back six years, and their reports are the reason the 2026 call was news at all. On Sunday 30 August 2020, around 6:30 pm, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 1997 on final approach to LAX radioed: "Tower, American 1997. We just passed a guy in a jet pack." The controller, audibly taken aback, asked: "American 1997, OK, thank you for the update. Left side or right side?" The pilot answered: "Off the left side, at maybe, uh, 300 yards or so, at our altitude." A Southwest Airlines crew added: "Tower, we just saw the guy pass by us." The tower then warned an inbound JetBlue pilot of "a person with a jet pack reported 300 yards south of the L.A. final at about 3,000 feet," and the JetBlue pilot answered "We heard and are definitely looking." The controller closed the sequence with the line that made the story a global one: "Only in LA."

On 14 October 2020 the pilot of a China Airlines flight reported an object at around 6,000 feet over the Culver City or Century City areas and answered yes when a controller asked whether it resembled a jet pack. On 28 July 2021, at approximately 6:10 pm, the pilot of a Kalitta Air cargo Boeing 747 on approach over the Santa Fe Springs and Whittier areas told controllers he could see the "jet man" off his right wing at approximately 5,000 feet. On Thursday 23 June 2022, at around 2:45 pm, a pilot roughly fifteen minutes from the airport told a controller: "Yeah, we just saw a guy with a jetpack about 4,500 feet." Separately, in December 2020, a video shot by people on an instructional flight out of Torrance airport appeared to show a figure flying off the Palos Verdes coast at around 3,000 feet.

Two named professionals inside the industry have argued about what these witnesses saw without ever calling them liars, and both are worth quoting because they mark the honest edges of the case. Ross Aimer, a retired airline pilot and aviation consultant, told NBC4 in November 2021 that the LAPD balloon images fit what the jet crews described. "This now explains that this could possibly be what they saw," Aimer said. He believed the pilots had made honest reports to controllers, but that at the high relative speed of a jetliner on approach the crews may have only caught a glimpse of the objects. "There's a very good possibility the previous ones were also balloons and pilots mistook them as jetpacks," he said. "This is a better explanation to me and to the aviation community." David Mayman, chief executive of the Los Angeles based manufacturer JetPack Aviation, went the other way on the technology and landed in a third place entirely: he said his company's machines, none of which had been sold, hold about a dozen gallons of fuel, roughly ten minutes worth, and could not have reached the altitudes the pilots described. "To climb and descend, it takes some time to do that," he said. "You'd just be out of fuel." His own theory was a battery powered drone loaded with an inflatable mannequin and flown remotely. "Any teen could put this together with parts from China," Mayman said. "You could be talking about a bright high school kid or college kid, they could build something like this really easily." Mark Weiss, a former American Airlines captain, told the BBC that although it was uncommon for balloons to get into the path of aircraft it could still be a very startling experience, that a pilot who sees something coming towards them might need to make an abrupt manoeuvre and put passengers at risk, and that a balloon carrying metal parts "could potentially destroy an engine."

Is the Man in the Wingsuit Over the LAX Approach (14 June 2026) real? The two-pass assessment

Pass one: how could this be entirely ordinary?

The strongest prosaic candidate is the one the government already favours for the earlier reports, a drifting human-shaped balloon. Its great virtue is that it is not hypothetical. The Los Angeles Police Department genuinely photographed a limbed, humanoid inflatable at altitude over Beverly Hills in early November 2020, and that image is the hero of this file. Human-shaped airwalker balloons are sold cheaply, they escape, and they reach thousands of feet. A jet descending through 4,000 feet at approach speed closes on a stationary object fast enough that the object appears to cross the flight path, so "crossed above us" does not require the object to have been moving at all. Against that, the specific description is awkward. An airwalker inflatable presents a head, torso, arms and legs in an upright posture, which is why the LAPD footage reads as a floating figure. A wingsuit flyer presents almost the opposite silhouette, a flattened delta with the arms and legs spread into fabric surfaces and the body in a head-down prone attitude. The crew did not say they saw a person shape, they said they saw a wingsuit. It is possible to get from one to the other in a two second glimpse, but it is not the natural reading, and nobody at the FAA has publicly applied the balloon theory to this report.

The second candidate is that a wingsuit flyer was actually there. This is where the physical constraints bite hardest, and they bite in a direction that has nothing to do with the plausibility of the technology. Wingsuits are real, commonplace and flown by thousands of people. The problem is the flight profile. A wingsuit flyer is a skydiver in a fabric wing, not a powered aircraft, and cannot gain altitude. To be at 4,000 feet the flyer must have exited an aircraft well above that, ordinarily at jump altitude in the low teens of thousands of feet, and must then continue descending until a canopy opens, ordinarily in the low thousands, followed by a parachute descent lasting minutes over whatever lies below. That means several things should have existed and did not. A jump aircraft would have had to climb to jump altitude over or beside one of the busiest arrival corridors in the world, in Class B airspace, under SoCal TRACON's radar and with a transponder. An open canopy should have hung over suburban Los Angeles in broad daylight in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, in view of tens of thousands of people, and a Sheriff's helicopter was overhead within minutes looking for exactly that. Nobody found a canopy, a jumper, an aircraft or a body. On top of that the flight would have been a straightforward federal violation of 14 CFR 105.25(a)(2), which forbids a parachute operation within or into Class B airspace without an air traffic control authorization, and of 105.21(a), which requires an FAA certificate of authorization for a jump over a congested area. No such authorization existed, which is precisely why the controller was surprised.

The third candidate is a jetpack, and it is the one the earlier series was named for. The physics here are documented rather than assumed. Gravity Industries, the best known jet suit maker, flies a rig whose five turbines produce 317 pounds of thrust and which, according to AOPA's reporting on the company's own literature, carries enough fuel for about four minutes of flight and has a maximum potential altitude of 12,000 feet, with the company deliberately staying close to the ground. David Mayman of JetPack Aviation put his own machines at about ten minutes of fuel and said flatly that climbing to and descending from the reported altitudes would exhaust it. Both figures point the same way: reaching four to six thousand feet, loitering long enough to be seen, and then getting down alive is at or beyond the edge of what any publicly known jet suit can do, and there is no known airfield or launch point near the LAX approach corridor. In any case, the 14 June 2026 crew did not report a jetpack.

The fourth candidate is Mayman's own, a drone carrying a mannequin or an inflatable figure, flown remotely. Nothing about that is technically difficult. Six years of federal investigation across four or five separate pilot reports has produced no recovered airframe, no arrest, no confession and no video from the operator, which is a long time for a stunt with an audience to stay silent, but absence of a culprit is not evidence against the method.

The fifth candidate, and the honest core of the sceptical case, is simple misperception at closing speed. This is Ross Aimer's argument and it is a good one. An unresolved object seen for a second or two from a descending flight deck carries almost no information about range, size or speed. A kite, a paraglider, a large model aircraft, a cluster of balloons or a piece of debris, seen briefly and at an unknown distance, can acquire whatever shape the observer's pattern recognition supplies, and a Los Angeles flight crew in 2026 has six years of jetpack man folklore sitting in the back of its head. That is not an accusation of incompetence. It is a description of what human vision does with two seconds of an unfamiliar object against sky.

Pass two: what resists the ordinary explanations?

First, the character of the witnesses and the immediacy of the action taken. This was not a story told later. It was a report made on frequency, doubled down on when challenged, relayed as a traffic hazard to a following airliner, and escalated into a live helicopter search within minutes. Controllers and crews do not do that for a bird.

Second, the change in the description. Every earlier report in this series named a jetpack, the one thing that the physics most strongly rule out. The 2026 report names a wingsuit, which is the one human flight mode that could actually put a person at 4,000 feet over Downey. If these reports were pure folklore feeding on themselves, the folklore would have repeated the jetpack. Instead the crew described something more physically coherent and less culturally available. That is the kind of detail that does not fit a simple contagion account.

Third, the geographic and temporal clustering is real and has not been remarked on much. The Kalitta 747 report of 28 July 2021 was over Santa Fe Springs and Whittier at about 5,000 feet. The 23 June 2022 report was fifteen miles east of LAX at about 4,500 feet, at around 2:45 in the afternoon. The 14 June 2026 report was west of the 605 and north of the 105, which is the same suburban wedge, at 4,000 feet, at around 2:35 in the afternoon. Three of the reports fall in the same corridor, in the same altitude band, and two of them within ten minutes of the same time of day. Something recurs on the eastern feed into LAX in the early afternoon. That pattern is compatible with balloons released from the same neighbourhoods and carried on the same prevailing onshore flow. It is also compatible with a person doing the same thing repeatedly.

Against all of that sits the hardest fact in the file: in six years of these reports, across at least five separate professional sightings and a great deal of official attention, not one usable image of the object has ever been produced, nothing has ever been recovered, and no radar correlation has ever been published. The only photograph anyone has is of a Halloween decoration that no pilot ever claimed to have seen.

Tier and why.

This case is tiered Unknown. There is no official narrative that resolves it. The Federal Aviation Administration said it was investigating and has published nothing since. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department searched and found nobody, which is an absence rather than an identification. No named analyst has advanced an evidenced explanation of the 14 June 2026 report specifically, and the Metabunk discussion of the jetpack series, which ran from September 2020 to August 2021, contains no calculation, no drift model, no angular size work and no endurance analysis, only a set of competing guesses. The FBI and FAA balloon theory is a real official statement, but it is an official assertion about the 2020 to 2022 jetpack reports, it has never been demonstrated against any specific sighting, and nobody has extended it to a wingsuit report four years later. Under this archive's rules an official assertion without a shown method for this event does not reach a disputed tier, and an explanation nobody has actually advanced for this event certainly does not. If the FAA does eventually attach the balloon theory to this report, it would move the case to Barely Disputed at most, because the theory would still lack a demonstrated object.

One clarification is owed to readers who arrive expecting the usual shape of a UFO case. The object here was arguably identified in the ordinary sense, in that a trained crew said it was a human being in a specific piece of flying equipment. What has never been established is that any such person existed. The sighting is unexplained not because the witnesses could not name what they saw, but because what they named should have left a trail across a city of ten million people and left none at all.