'Dorito' shaped aircraft spotted flying over Area 51 at night sparks UFO fears
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: YouTube/Uncanny Expeditions/DigitalGlobe via Getty Images
An explorer reckons he's captured footage of 'something interesting' near Area 51, which links back to alleged UFO sightings from more than a decade ago.
Located in southern Nevada, Area 51 is often associated with alleged unidentified flying objects, with many conspiracy theorists even claiming it's where the US government harbors alien life.
It's the home to a highly classified US Air Force base that's located within the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR), and no one really knows what goes on there.
With the mystery, many adventurers decide to explore the area, including backpacker and videographer Anders Otteson.
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Otteson was filming his experience camping out near the test facility on January 14 and spotted two aircraft - one a little more unusual than the other.
At 1am, he started hearing the sound of jet engines in the distance, and soon after spotted what he thought was a B-2 stealth bomber aircraft overhead.
He said in a YouTube video: "Closer to three in the morning, I got another low flyover, but this one looked different."
He said the shape was 'close to an equilateral triangle with a flatter trailing edge', before describing it as 'Dorito' shaped, which certainly makes it easier to envisage.
Eerily, similar Dorito-shaped unidentified objects have been photographed before by Jeff Templin in Wichita in 2014 and Steve Douglass in Amarillo, Texas in the same year.
While the shape of these mystery objects wasn't a million miles away from known military aircraft, no one ever found out for certain what they were.
Otteson admitted that many people think these pictures are just B-2 aircraft, and he's not entirely sure his footage doesn't just show another B-2 as well 'pitched at an odd angle'.
He said: "It's hard to say conclusively what we're looking at, but in relation to all the other recent Dorito sightings in Death Valley and the ones going back to 2014, I think we have something interesting here.
"Are we looking at a classified test flight or run-of-the-mill training?"
When news outlets tried to get to the bottom of what exactly Templin's Dorito was, officials were evasive.
USNI News said the shape was 'reminiscent of the U.S Navy’s General Dynamics/McDonnell Douglas A-12 Avenger II carrier-based bomber program'.
But US Air Force spokesperson Jennifer Cassidy told them: "Given the resolution of this photo, we can’t even tell if it is a military aircraft, much less an Air Force one."
When they asked FAA spokesperson Alison Duquette what it was, she simply responded: "I do not know."
So the odds of Otteson getting to the bottom of exactly what he saw are slim.