(The Drive) – Around 9 pm local time on Saturday, March 16th, 2019, an air ambulance helicopter was flying roughly 15 miles west of central Last Vegas when something odd caught his aided eye. During an exchange with an air traffic controller, the pilot of Mercy Air 21, an Agusta 119 Koala helicopter, noted spotting an unidentified object some distance from his position and only he was likely able to see it in the darkness as he was wearing night vision goggles (NVGs). The controller responded that he had nothing on radar
in the area where he was seeing the object, but when he heard the pilot could only see it through his NVGs, he responded with amazement. Our good friend @Aircraftspots mentioned the odd exchange on twitter and posted the audio to Soundcloud, which you can listen to in full below. Apparently, he was tipped off to it by fellow Twitter user and aviation aficionado @KE6ZGP. You can hear the pilot alert the controller to spotting something over the “Southern Hills area.” This is not a topographic landmark, it is a hospital in the southwest corner of the Las Vegas metropolitan area. He notes that the objects appears to be at around 7,000 feet and that it could be a balloon or “something along those lines” and that it is unlit. READ MORE
