It wasn’t flying, but there was definitely an unidentified object on the Capital Beltway in Washington D.C. last night. The internet was abuzz with rumors about a UFO being transported on a flatbed truck through the city last night.
Did a UFO crash? Was this a secret government operation? Did the military forget to bring a tarp to hide the UFO from the public eye?
According to Fox News , the UFO was actually Northrop Grumman’s X-47B drone. The unmanned aircraft was being transported from West Virginia to the Patuxent Naval Air Station in Maryland.
According to Matt Funk, a lead test engineer for the X-47B, people in the area can look forward to seeing the UFO a few more times in the coming months. Funk told MSNBC:
“In the coming months, you can expect to see the X-47B flying over the base and surrounding area along the Chesapeake Bay.”
The military also sent out a release about the X-47B to calm people’s extraterrestrial confusion.
“The X-47B is the first unmanned vehicle designed to take off and land on an aircraft carrier. As part of the program’s demonstration, the X-47B will perform arrested landings and catapult launches at Pax to validate its ability to conduct precision approaches to the carrier. The base is one of only a few sites in the world where the Navy can run performance tests on aircraft-carrier catapult operations at a land-based facility with flight test and engineering support resources not available on a ship.”
But that didn’t stop Twitter from spreading UFO rumors last night.
“Did anyone else see the pics of the “UFO” that landed on the D.C freeway yesterday? 0_o”
Another wrote:
Earthquakes in MD, then tornadoes, zombies, and a UFO? # 2012IsReal
In Twitter’s defense, that thing really does look like what I assume a UFO would look like.
This isn’t the first UFO spotting this year. Although it is the first that was spotted on the back of a track. Last month a mid-air collision was nearly caused by a strange flying object (the pilot suspects that it was a large remote-controlled plane) and in April a group of conspiracy theorists were positive that they spotted a UFO circling the sun.
