Mysterious UFO spotted near America’s secretive military testing site

May 1, 2026

A family hiking in Southern California has revealed stunning images of a mysterious craft flying overhead during a solar eclipse.

The four hikers spotted a large dumbbell or H-shaped UFO flying slowly and erratically near Ryan Mountain in Joshua Tree National Park on October 14, 2023.

According to the witnesses, they followed the object for about 45 minutes, watching it disappear and reappear several times before it vanished completely.

Images of the craft, shared with safeaerospace.org, a nonprofit group focused on aerospace safety and national security, captured a clear view of the UFO, which was made of a highly reflective material described as silver.

It was described as looking like a ‘capital I’ or ‘sideways H’, and its two large panels on each end gave it a shape reminiscent of a TIE fighter from the Star Wars films.

Skeptics sharing the sighting online have suggested that the craft may have been a box kite or an escaped letter H party balloon.

However, the hikers estimated that the craft was the size of a car or small plane, which would make the object significantly larger than the typical kite and balloon.

While the Pentagon has maintained that physical evidence of UFOs or extraterrestrials has never been found, the sighting took place near several US military bases, including one that has tested experimental aircraft for decades.

The family of four noted in their report that the suspected UFO was within a few miles of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC) at Twentynine Palms, about 125 miles east of Los Angeles.

However, the sighting also took place roughly 115 miles from Edwards Air Force Base, the world’s largest airfield – and a famous testing ground for experimental aircraft and prototypes since the 1940s.

In fact, the base is home to the 412th Test Wing and the Air Force Test Center, the service’s main location for developmental flight testing of new technology.

Those tests have included the X-1, which conducted the first supersonic flight in history, and more recently, the B-21 Raider, a sixth-generation stealth bomber unveiled in 2022.

The Daily Mail has reached out to the Pentagon for comment on the sighting and to learn if the military was conducting tests in the area during the 2023 eclipse.

While it remains unclear what the family actually saw over Joshua Tree National Park, the incident has been taken seriously and shared publicly by an expert in the field of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the modern name for UFOs.

Safeaerospace.org was founded by Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot and one of the key witnesses on UAP incidents who has testified before Congress about what he saw during his decade-long career.