Nearly a year after the first sighting by airliners and multiple FAA and FBI investigations, the “Jetpack Man” continues to appear to aircraft flying around the Los Angeles area and especially to airliners on final to Los Angeles International.
The latest occurrence, which was first reported by ABC7, happened at around 6:15 PM this evening in its most usual spot, right off the final approach to LAX. The ATC audio was quite lively following the spotting, although it is bizarre how much more familiar the situation seemed than it did a year ago. The exchanges include asking if the pilots saw “the UFO” and what appears to be a new trend of referring to LA’s mystery Jetpack Man as “Iron Man.” You can also tell the pilot who called it in, a 747 pilot, knew he had to, but really didn’t seem too excited about the circus that would go with it.
Check out the exchanges for yourself below (audio via the awesome folks at ATCLive.net):
If you told me a year ago that I would have produced six stories on this crazy deal without any sort of closure, I would never have believed you. But these are strange times. So strange, in fact, that pilot reports of a Jetpack Man flying around one of the world’s busiest airports really doesn’t seem all that jarring anymore.
Regardless, one thing is becoming quite evident—something really is going on. It is getting very hard to discount these encounters as a fluke or some errant trick of the light. There is something around LAX that is capable of flight that looks like a dude in a jetpack. Maybe it’s a balloon or a drone (make sure to read this before rolling your eyes!), but it is flying where it shouldn’t, including apparently pretty far out over the water. So someone has to be behind it.
We will update this story when more information comes available.
Contact the author: Tyler@thedrive.com