Something in the Sky: WTF Arizona? 🌵🛸
High Strangeness in the Arizona desert.
I have accepted that part of my personality needs the country—wilderness, frontier, nature—but I also need the city—concerts, restaurants, culture. This dichotomy means I will always have a restlessness no matter whose bed my boots are under. No matter where I live, I will always need to feed that other part of me.
That’s why road trips to lonesome places have become such a big part of my story in this era of living in a major city. I take every opportunity I can to throw my gear in the truck, rally the dogs, and head out to some less-traveled corner of the desert. Because of this, I spend a lot of time looking up at the sky far from the light pollution of an urban core.
Having spent so much time staring at the sky, I’ve had some experiences I can’t explain—three of them, to be exact.
I divide these experiences into two categories. The first was something I saw in 2015 over the Oregon coast, which I wrote about in the article below.
I won’t recap that experience here since I’ve already written about it on the Endless American Road, but that it forever changed how I see reality is unquestionable. Whatever model I had of the universe prior to that night in 2015 was insufficient for what I experienced, and whatever worldview I cobble together now must be broad enough to encompass that anomalous event.
The next two sightings fall into a second category. The first occurred in May 2025, and the second happened just a few weeks ago in February 2026. My sighting over the Oregon coast in 2015 was truly alien—unexplainable by any material rationale we currently have for how the world works. It shattered my previous understanding of reality.
The more recent experiences in Arizona that I’m writing about today are more pedestrian but no less mysterious. They are weird, yes, but they also come with context that can satisfy even the more skeptical among us. Both are documented—unlike that night in Oregon. I’m sharing that documentation here, now, for your consideration.
Last May I took a trip to the town of Portal, Arizona and from there drove a bumpy forest road many miles up into the Chiricahua Mountains close to the intersection of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. Here’s a map of exactly where I was:
I made camp around 8,000 feet and walked around the area with the dogs, catching a beautiful sunset over the distant mountains of New Mexico (and maybe Mexico?). Then I built a fire and put the dogs in the truck. That night I was camping simply—instead of a tent, I chose to string up my hammock between two trees, which is my preferred way to sleep. I was hanging out by the campfire, and around 8:22 pm on May 1, 2025, I was staring up at the full moon when I saw something in the sky.
It was a second moon, as bright and full as the one I had been looking at. As the light came over the mountain and began to move, I knew I was seeing something anomalous. It was happening again—a second sighting almost exactly ten years after my experience on the Oregon coast—but unlike that first night, this time I had my cellphone on me. The video is below (please mute it or forgive my swearing in advance):
Okay, so seriously, what the fuck was that? I’m not claiming this sighting was alien (though I’m also not ruling it out). For context, there are plenty of things that point toward a more terrestrial explanation. First, this video is from May 2025, just a few months after the mass reports of sightings that the media labeled “drones” over New Jersey and several other parts of the United States in December 2024. When Trump took office, he promised to disclose to the American people what was behind all of these sightings. His Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had this to say in her first press conference:
When you consider that my little video—high in the remote mountains of southeast Arizona—happened just three months after this press conference, the possibility that what I was seeing was a military craft seems plausible. There are also two more facts to consider: 1) There is a military base about 75 miles away from where I was camped. 2) I’m roughly the same distance from the US/Mexico border, at a time when the US was clamping down hard on border security. These two facts lend credence to the idea that what I saw could have been a military (or even cartel?) craft.
Still, the way the light shoots straight up as I’m filming it defies what we know about conventional aircraft. I leave the interpretation of this sighting to the reader; my mission here is simply to share what I saw and to present the evidence I have.
My third anomalous sighting happened on February 28th, 2026 near sundown in the Kofa Wilderness Area about 70 miles north of Yuma, Arizona along the Arizona/California/Mexico border. The location is below:
That night, February 28th, 2026, I parked my truck along King Canyon Road and spent the afternoon walking the washes and desert. Near sundown, I was admiring the sunset and taking photographs when I noticed something peculiar. These photos are below:
Do you see it? Look closer along the ridgeline of the highest peak and zoom in on the area about 45 degrees to the left of that tallest peak. What you’ll see—and what I saw that night—is something hovering in the air, large and completely stationary. In fact, there’s a 10-minute gap between the first and last photograph in the gallery above, but in all of them the object is there—hovering, unlike anything officially acknowledged to exist.
In total, I estimate I watched the craft for at least 45 minutes, and it was still there as the sun set. But once it got dark, I just couldn’t see it anymore. It emitted no light (unlike a commercial aircraft) and it didn’t move at all. The next morning, it was gone.
Here’s a video as well (please mute this one):
Now the disclaimers: Like the second sighting, this one also took place near a military zone. The Yuma Proving Ground (a U.S. Army missile and weapons testing site) is just 20–30 miles south of here (and the southern edge of the Kofa Refuge actually borders it in places). I’m also about 70 miles from the US/Mexico border. The possibility that this was an undisclosed military craft is certainly plausible, though the object I saw behaved differently than what we know about conventional aircraft.
I present these sighting as evidence; I am not asking you to draw a particular conclusion from them. But that something unconventional is happening over the skies of Arizona (as others have also observed) is well documented.
So I encourage you, fellow travelers, get away from the city to somewhere dark. Start a fire, pour some bourbon, and look up at the sky. You never know what you might see.
From the Arizona desert, this is your sky-watcher JohnnyAppleseedX, looking up at the sky and signing off.
🫡🛸🇺🇸🌵