Two Air Force F-16 fighter jets scrambled from March Air Reserve Base on Sunday to intercept an unidentified object flying at high altitude over Northern California — and when the first attempt proved inconclusive, they were sent right back up again.
The jets, flying under call signs SURF31 and SURF32, launched around 6:30 a.m. Pacific time, after a civilian cargo aircraft in the area reported something unusual in controlled airspace. The crew described the object as "glowing and dimming." As reported by Newsmax, the fighters remained in the area for roughly two and a half hours before turning back toward base.
They never made it home. While on final approach to March Air Reserve Base, the F-16s and a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker providing aerial refueling support were retasked after additional reports of an unidentified object. They arrived back in the Northern California area around 10:45 a.m. and returned to base approximately 35 minutes later.
What the jets found — or didn't find — remains unclear. Officials described the target only as an "unidentified object," and no resolution to either intercept has been publicly reported.
What we know and what we don't
The details here are thin, and that's part of the story. No specific officials have been named. No agency or branch has claimed the intercepts on the record. The characterization of the object as "unidentified" comes from unnamed sources, and the air traffic communications were tracked by Aircraft Spot on the social media platform X.
There's no official word on whether pilots made visual or radar contact during either sortie. The object's altitude, speed, size, and precise heading beyond a general northeast trajectory are all unreported. It's also unknown whether the second intercept involved the same object or something else entirely.
That's a lot of blanks for an event that involved two armed fighter jets, a refueling tanker, and nearly five hours of military activity over American airspace.
The airspace question isn't going away
This isn't happening in a vacuum. American airspace has become a recurring subject of public concern — from the Chinese surveillance balloon saga to the string of shoot-downs over North America, to the drone sightings that sparked alarm across the East Coast. Each time, the public gets fragments. Unnamed officials. Vague descriptions. Delayed explanations or no explanations at all.
The pattern is consistent: something enters U.S. airspace that shouldn't be there, the military responds, and the American public is told as little as possible as slowly as possible. Whatever is flying over Northern California at dawn on a Sunday — whether it's foreign, domestic, or something else entirely — the reflex toward opacity doesn't build confidence. It erodes it.
Scrambling F-16s is not a routine event. A KC-135 Stratotanker doesn't loiter over California for hours on a whim. The military clearly took these reports seriously enough to commit significant assets twice in a single morning. The public deserves to know why.
The civilian dimension
It's worth noting that the initial report came from a civilian cargo aircraft operating in controlled airspace. These aren't hobbyist drone pilots or conspiracy enthusiasts scanning the sky with binoculars. A professional flight crew, in contact with air traffic control, observed something they couldn't identify and described it as glowing and dimming. That's the kind of report that gets taken seriously, and evidently was.
The question is what happens next. Does this end up in the same classification black hole as every other unexplained aerial incursion? Or does someone with a name and a title actually tell the American people what's operating in their skies?
Accountability starts with transparency
The default posture of federal agencies has been to treat the public as an afterthought when it comes to airspace incursions. That approach was defensible when the assumption was that unidentified objects were benign curiosities. After a Chinese surveillance balloon traversed the entire continental United States before anyone acted, that assumption is gone.
Two F-16s scrambled twice in one morning over Northern California. A cargo crew saw something glowing at altitude. The military burned hours of flight time and jet fuel chasing it. And the American public has been told, essentially, nothing.
That silence is its own kind of answer.
