At about 11:50 p.m. on April 30, 2023, a bright glowing meteor-like object was spotted streaking across the skies over Las Vegas, Nevada. The body-worn camera of a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) officer captured the event.
According to reports made with the American Meteor Society, at least 21 people spread across eastern California, Nevada and Utah witnessed the same green fireball that night, which was described as descending at a steep angle toward the west before exploding.
About 40 minutes later, a local resident called 911 emergency services and told the dispatcher that an object had crash-landed in his backyard.
"We just see in the corner of our eye something fall down from the sky, and it was with lights, and when it hit down there was like a big impact, and we felt like an energy?” the caller told the dispatcher.
“And then we hear like a lot of footsteps near us. And then - we have, like, big- a big equipment, and we see there's a, there's like an eight-foot person beside it and another one's inside, and it has big eyes and it's looking at us," he said. "They're very large. They're like eight foot, nine foot, 10 foot."
"And they're not human. One-hundred percent, they're not human," he added.
Two LVMPD officers responded to the incident. The department published the body-worn camera footage of one of the officers from when they were dispatched through the end of their interviews with the witnesses.
“I’m so nervous right now,” one of the responding officers tells the other in the video while they are driving to the house. “I have butterflies bro.”
One muses that people “saw a shooting star, and now these people say there’s aliens in their backyard.”
After interviewing them and investigating the supposed landing site in their backyard, the “officer conducted a preliminary investigation and closed the event as unfounded,” LVMPD said in a statement about the incident.
"Hey, if those nine-foot beings come back, don't call us alright?" an officer can be heard telling the witnesses in the video as the officers depart.
Debunking
As the story began to circulate in the media, a video surfaced that was purported to show the beings reported by the witnesses. However, investigators quickly debunked it, noting the date on the supposed security camera footage was weeks after the incident, and that it had come from a TikTok account that uses AI to generate realistic-looking videos of cryptids.
The witnesses’ claim about the landing site was also challenged. They had said the alien craft left a “perfect circle” indentation in the dirt, but Google Earth satellite photos show the same circle in the gravel yard since at least a year before the incident occurred.
Rumors Pentagon Has Alien Craft
The incident happened amid a flurry of claims about alien spacecraft in the media. David Grusch, a former US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) representative to the government’s unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) task force, alleged that Washington is covering up its possession of several extraterrestrial craft.
Then, last week, Michael Shellenberger, an activist and journalist, published a story claiming that multiple military and intelligence contractors had told him the US government is in possession of 12 non-human spacecraft.
Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Intelligence, wrote in a major US publication earlier this month that four witnesses had told him they are aware of “a secret US government program involving the analysis and exploitation of materials recovered from off-world craft.” He demanded the US government confirm the report to the public if it’s true.
That said, the SETI project, whose mission is explicitly to contact alien races, has stepped up its efforts to identify extraterrestrial signals traveling through space, including sending a fake alien signal from Mars to Earth last month to see how well Earthlings can detect, identify, and decode it.