Video of mysterious black orb hovering over High Desert sparks renewed speculation

A video of a mysterious black orb hovering over the High Desert taken nearly four years ago has sparked renewed interest in what the object might be.

The video was recently shared by a well-known British news outlet, causing the public's curiosity to pique once again.

Contractor Andy Segobia, 52, shot the video on his iPhone 7 in August 2020 as he was driving to work at El Mirage Field near Adelanto, the Daily Mail reported. El Mirage Airfield is used by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the manufacturers of the MQ-9 Reaper, the primary offensive strike unmanned, reconnaissance aerial vehicle for the Air Force.

Edwards Air Force Base, in Kern County, is located northwest of El Mirage Airfield, situated in San Bernardino County.

Not a balloon

Segobia began recording the object that was no more than 50 feet in the air, the Daily Mail reported.

Segobia told the Daily Mail that to the naked eye, the orb looked like dark tinted glass, was the size of the top of a palm tree, about 6 to 10 feet in diameter, and was completely silent.

“I thought it was a balloon at first. As I got closer, I could see it wasn't tethered to anything,” he said. “There was no sign of propulsion, there was no noise, it was just sitting there.”

After filming the 90-second video of the stationary object, Segobia said he went inside a building to take some measurements. He emerged less than a minute later to find the orb had disappeared.

Segobia admitted to regularly seeing plane-shaped unmanned drones taking off and landing at the El Mirage airstrip, and that General Atomics worked on building and repairing drones there.

He added that the sphere was unlike anything he'd ever seen.

Military video shows spherical object

During a Senate hearing in April 2023, the Pentagon released a declassified video of an orb-shaped UFO soaring above the Middle East in 2022.

The video footage captured by a U.S. military "Reaper" drone shows a mysterious spherical object zooming across the sky above an active military zone.

Government officials admitted to not knowing what the fast-moving orb was.

Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, admitted to not knowing what the fast-moving orb was as he played the video during a Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing.

The 2020 footage was similar to the "Mosul Orb," a similar-looking metallic orb recorded by a U.S. spy plane flying over Mosul, Iraq, in 2016.

Astronaut sees UFO in High Desert

The late Mercury and Gemini astronaut Gordon Cooper believes that UFOs have appeared in the sky and even landed in the High Desert.

In 1957, Cooper served as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, where he claimed he saw a flying saucer with a diameter of about 10 feet that hovered nearby and landed on the dry lake.

“I had a camera crew filming the installation when they spotted a UFO,” Cooper said. “They filmed it as it flew overhead, hovered, stretched out three legs like landing gear, and slowly descended to land on a dry lake bed.“

After that, Cooper sent the recordings to Washington D.C. and presented a report of the UFO encounter.

Daily Press reporter Rene Ray De La Cruz may be reached at 760-951-6227 or RDeLaCruz@VVDailyPress.com. Follow him on Twitter @DP_ReneDeLaCruz

This article originally appeared on Victorville Daily Press: Mysterious flying object in California sparks speculation