A witness near El Paso International Airport recorded video of what the person described as a large object hovering in the sky and releasing smaller objects from underneath, the Daily Mail reported.

The footage appeared at the same time the FAA suddenly closed a ten-mile section of airspace over the city, citing special security reasons, while the White House offered shifting explanations about the decision.

The driver who recorded the object on Tuesday didn't mince words:

"Looks like the mothership. It's huge. And there are stuff coming out from the bottom of it and going off to the left a little bit as it landed."

The video itself is far from conclusive — the object appears blurry, and skeptics noted the footage was too out of focus to make a clear identification. But it's the sequence of events surrounding the sighting that deserves scrutiny. Not the video alone. The timeline.

A closure with no clean explanation

At 11:30 PM Mountain Time on February 10, the FAA locked down airspace over El Paso from the ground up to 18,000 feet, roughly five miles southwest of the city. The closure grounded all commercial, cargo, and general aviation flights — including police and medical helicopters. It was originally announced to last ten days.

That kind of total airspace shutdown is virtually unprecedented outside of catastrophic national emergencies. The last time US airspace was shut down for national security was September 11, 2001. The FAA temporarily closed airspace over New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina due to storm damage. This was El Paso on a Tuesday night, with no announced emergency, no storm, no attack.

Then the closure was quickly called off.

And then the explanations started shifting.

Cartel drone, then party balloon

White House officials initially said the US had taken down a Mexican cartel drone flying across the southern border. Hours later, they revised: the object struck by a "high-powered laser" was actually a party balloon.

Two explanations in a matter of hours. A cartel drone and a party balloon are not the same thing. One is a national security threat from a hostile narco-state apparatus. The other is something you'd find at a child's birthday. The White House offered no direct, on-the-record quotes to clarify. No official stepped in front of a camera. The explanations were simply swapped out like interchangeable parts.

One commenter on X put it plainly:

"They are reporting today that it wasn't drones but a party balloon! It never ceases to amaze me how stupid they think the public are."

Notably, the White House made no mention of any unidentified flying objects or UAP in its reports on Wednesday. The sighting near the airport, the eyewitness video, the additional reports filed through the Enigma platform — none of it appeared in the official accounting.

Multiple sightings, not just one

The eyewitness near the airport wasn't alone. Another witness reported a sighting in the El Paso area on February 8 through the Enigma app, noting a recurring pattern:

"Every time I use my drones in this area, especially in a certain frequency I always have orbs run by."

A second witness submitted a sighting at 5:46 PM ET on the same day as the FAA shutdown. According to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), six reports of large "mothership"-type objects have been filed since 2022, including some describing smaller craft surrounding or emerging from them.

None of this constitutes proof of anything extraterrestrial. But it does constitute a pattern of sightings in a sensitive border region — sightings the government chose not to acknowledge while publicly pivoting between two contradictory cover stories about what triggered the most dramatic airspace closure in recent memory.

The real issue isn't aliens

The conservative frustration here isn't about believing in flying saucers. It's about institutional credibility — and the government's reflexive instinct to manage narratives rather than answer questions honestly.

You don't shut down airspace over a major American city, grounding medical helicopters, for a party balloon. You don't initially call something a cartel drone and then downgrade it to latex and helium without explaining what changed. And you don't ignore multiple civilian sightings filed through established reporting channels while offering the public a story that contradicts itself.

The Pentagon has maintained that there has never been any physical evidence recovered proving UFOs or extraterrestrial beings exist. That's the official line and has been for decades. Fair enough. But the official line also said this was a cartel drone before it said it was a balloon, so the official line's batting average took a hit this week.

President Trump has said he is open to full disclosure of all UFO incidents. White House insiders have allegedly claimed he already has a speech prepared addressing what the US government knows about the possibility of alien life. Whether that materializes remains to be seen, but the instinct toward transparency is the right one — especially when the bureaucratic default is to shuffle explanations until the news cycle moves on.

Trust is the variable

Americans don't need their government to confirm alien life to take these incidents seriously. They need their government to pick one story and defend it with evidence. The shifting explanations out of El Paso accomplished the opposite; they made a blurry video from an anonymous driver more credible than an official White House statement.

That's not the eyewitness's fault. That's not UFO researchers stirring up hysteria. That's the natural consequence of institutions that treat the public like an audience to be managed rather than citizens to be informed.

Another social media user captured the exhaustion perfectly:

"I feel like I've seen this story before…"

They have. The weather balloon explanation has been the government's go-to since 1947. Nearly eighty years later, and the playbook hasn't changed — only the public's willingness to accept it has.