LAS VEGAS BACKYARD ALIENS

Opening

Just before midnight on 30 April 2023, a bright green fireball streaked across the sky over Nevada, California and Utah. A Las Vegas police officer's body camera caught it. About forty minutes later, a young man called 911 from a house in the northwest of the city. Something had fallen into the family's backyard, he said, and there were two creatures in it, eight to ten feet tall, with big eyes. "They're 100 percent not human." When the footage and the call were released, the "Las Vegas backyard aliens" went around the world.

Timeline

30 April 2023, about 11:49 p.m. A bright fireball crosses the sky. The American Meteor Society receives 22 reports from witnesses spread over about 540 miles, from Utah to California. A Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officer's body camera records a green flash at about 11:50 p.m.

1 May 2023, about 12:30 a.m. A caller tells a 911 dispatcher that he and his family saw something fall from the sky into their backyard, and that two tall, thin, grey-green beings are there now, one hiding behind the construction machinery kept in the yard.

The same night. Officers arrive and speak to the family on the sidewalk. One officer, on body camera before setting off, says he is nervous: he has just seen a shooting star, and now people are saying there are aliens in a backyard. Officers search the yard and find nothing. The call is closed as unfounded.

Late May to June 2023. George Knapp and photographer Matt Adams of the 8 News Now I-Team obtain the call logs and body camera footage and break the story. The witness, a young man named Angel, gives interviews describing the creatures in more detail, and says the place in the yard where the object landed looked blurred, as if hidden by some kind of camouflage.

June 2023. The family say they are being harassed by visitors and curiosity-seekers, and Las Vegas police set up cameras at the house to help protect them.

Mid-June 2023. Angel stops giving public interviews.

Key figures

Angel, the young man who made the 911 call, is the main witness. Other family members were present, but the clearest descriptions are his. George Knapp, the Las Vegas reporter who broke the Bob Lazar story in 1989, was the journalist who got the official records released. Kenny Biddle, an investigator for the Skeptical Inquirer, wrote the most detailed sceptical study of the case.

Physical and documentary trail

Unusually for an alien encounter, this one comes with official records: a recorded 911 call, police call logs, several body camera videos and the American Meteor Society's witness reports. They show that something bright really did cross the sky that night, that a 911 call really was made, and that police really did respond. They do not show any creatures, and the officers found no physical evidence in the yard.

NASA's assessment of the fireball was that it was a meteor less than a metre across, hundreds of miles away, and that nothing from it landed in Las Vegas. Of the seven American Meteor Society reports from the Las Vegas area, none mentioned a sound.

Things you might not know

• The fireball is on police video. A body camera recorded the green flash forty minutes before the 911 call, which is part of why the story was taken seriously.
• The officer had butterflies. On his own body camera, one of the responding officers says he is nervous on the way to the house, having just seen the shooting star himself.
• The "crash circle" was older than the crash. The family pointed to a circular mark in the gravel. Kenny Biddle found the same circle in Google Earth satellite images from April 2022, more than a year earlier, and identified it as tracks from vehicles stored in the yard.
• The aliens got more detailed over time. In later interviews the creatures gained visible eyelashes, a bent leg and breathing that could be heard from 50 feet away.
• The same reporter broke Bob Lazar. George Knapp, who brought this case to the public, is the reporter who first put Lazar on air in 1989.
• The police ended up protecting the witnesses. After the story spread, the family complained of people turning up at the house, and police installed cameras there.

Competing explanations

A real encounter. The meteor was real, the family called the police straight away, and the witness's fear sounds genuine on the call. Supporters point out that a landing could have been timed with, or hidden by, the fireball, and that the "camouflage" description fits other reports of beings that seem to bend light.

A prank that grew. This is the conclusion of Kenny Biddle's investigation in the Skeptical Inquirer. The fireball was a real meteor far away, the circle in the gravel was already there, and the descriptions grew in each retelling. He also noted that the creatures resembled the aliens in the 2002 film Signs.

A frightened misperception. A very bright meteor, a dark yard full of machinery and a startled family at midnight could produce a real scare without anyone setting out to deceive.

Later life of the case

The Las Vegas backyard aliens became one of the most viral UFO stories of 2023, coming just weeks before David Grusch went public. Analysts have since claimed to see "cloaked" figures in the family's security camera footage, while sceptics say the footage shows nothing. The police case remains closed as unfounded.

Finding

The fireball is real and on police video, and so is the 911 call. Everything beyond that rests on one family's account, which grew more detailed over time, and the one piece of physical evidence they pointed to, the circle in the gravel, was there a year before. The best explanation is a real meteor followed by a story that was, at the least, embellished.

What still will not resolve: what the family actually saw or believed they saw in that yard. The caller sounded scared, and he has not spoken publicly since 2023.