In late March 2020, right as Covid was beginning to reshape everything, I made a long drive from New Jersey to Arizona that I still remember for one very strange reason. Somewhere after crossing into Arizona from New Mexico, I spotted an object high in the sky that did not behave like anything I could easily explain. It looked like a large vertical cylinder, appeared to be hanging over the area near Chiricahua National Monument, and stayed in view long enough that it never felt like a quick misidentification or a blink-and-you-miss-it moment.
At the time, my then-fiancée, now my wife, had already flown out to Arizona a few days earlier to stay with family. Covid cases were surging in New Jersey, and Arizona seemed like a safer place to wait things out for a while. Since we had a dog and did not want to put him on a plane, I made the trip by car. I left New Jersey on March 27, 2020, and arrived in Tucson around midday on March 29.
That morning, while driving westbound on I-10 after crossing from New Mexico into Arizona, I noticed something unusual in the sky. The weather was clear, and in that part of the Southwest, visibility can be incredible. You can see mountain ranges from far away, and the scale of the landscape makes objects stand out in a way they do not in more crowded parts of the country.
What caught my attention was what I can only describe as a very large, vertical cylinder-shaped object at high altitude. From my vantage point, it seemed to be hovering somewhere above the Chiricahua area. My guess at the time was that it was extremely high up, maybe around the altitude commercial aircraft cruise, though that is obviously just an estimate from the ground. What stood out most was not just its shape, but the fact that it seemed frozen in place.
I watched it for roughly 20 to 30 minutes as I continued down the highway. During that time, it did not appear to move at all. That was the part that really stuck with me. On a road where the scenery changes slowly and you can track distant landmarks for miles, this object stayed visible long enough to leave an impression. I even tried to pull over and get a photo, but I could not capture anything clearly enough to be useful.
What makes the sighting even more interesting to me is that it was not the first time I had seen something like this in the Southwest.
Back in 2016, when I was living in Tucson, I had another sighting that felt extremely similar. I was driving west toward San Diego, somewhere in a remote stretch of desert highway in either Arizona or California. I never submitted that experience anywhere because I cannot honestly pin down the exact location. It was one of those stretches of road where there is no signal, the landscape goes on forever, and every mile starts to look the same. Still, I remember seeing something with a very similar look. That earlier sighting happened later in the day, not in the morning, and again I remember driving westbound, almost toward it.
That does not prove anything, of course. There could be explanations I never found. Perspective in the desert can be deceptive, and the sky over the Southwest has a way of making distant objects feel even stranger than they are. But the 2020 sighting has stayed with me because of how long I watched it, how clear the conditions were, and how unusual the object looked compared to anything I would normally expect to see from the road.
That is probably part of why stories like this keep resurfacing. The Southwest has a reputation for strange sightings for a reason. The open terrain, huge skies, military activity in some regions, and sheer isolation all create the kind of environment where odd things get noticed and remembered. Sometimes there is a clean explanation. Sometimes there is not. And sometimes what lingers is not just the object itself, but the feeling of watching something that does not fit neatly into your normal categories.
I cannot say for certain what I saw over southern Arizona that morning in March 2020. I can only say that it looked like a large vertical cylinder high in the sky, that it appeared motionless for much longer than I would have expected, and that it reminded me of another unexplained sighting I had years earlier in the same part of the country. Even now, that is enough to keep the experience in my mind. There really are a lot of strange things out in the desert, especially when you can see for miles and feel like the sky is showing you more than it should.