A helicopter camera from FOX 11 Los Angeles caught a strange sphere moving across the frame during a live traffic broadcast over a Los Angeles freeway. The sighting occurred on September 22, but the footage quickly moved from television to social media and, more than a week later, continues to circulate among millions of users.

On TikTok, Instagram and X, people also posted that they had seen a similar object from the ground.

The original footage shows a roughly spherical object crossing the camera’s field of view. The camera zooms in and tracks it for several seconds. No wings, propellers or other obvious means of propulsion are visible, and the object has yet to be publicly identified.

🚨Los Angeles, California..🇺🇸

September 2026..

FOX 11 Los Angeles was doing a traffic report, the capture more then cars on the road..

A "spherical" shaped UFO is filmed cruising over the city… pic.twitter.com/mevjPckE6Z

— UAPWixy (@UAPWixy) September 22, 2026

A drone or a UAP?

One of the most common theories circulating online is that the sphere could have been a drone. That remains a possibility, but there has been no official identification to confirm it.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulates drones operating in U.S. airspace. Federal rules include altitude limits as well as specific requirements for flights in controlled airspace.

Los Angeles also has official drone operations. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has operated a Drone as First Responder Unit since August 2026, following a pilot program launched in 2025. That does not mean the sphere seen in the FOX 11 footage was an LAPD drone: there is no official report identifying it as a police aircraft.

Another term that quickly became part of the online discussion was UAP — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — the designation now used by the U.S. government for certain sightings that cannot initially be identified.

The U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to receive, analyze and resolve UAP reports involving areas of national security.

AARO also receives information from different branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. Its public archive includes cases submitted by the Army, Air Force and other military commands, some accompanied by footage captured by sensors aboard military platforms.

So far, however, there is no public AARO report linking the sphere recorded by FOX 11 in Los Angeles to any of its cases.

What official UAP reports show

The object seen in the FOX 11 footage shares one characteristic with a significant number of UAP reports collected by the U.S. government: its round or spherical appearance.

According to statistics published by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), 31% of UAP reports received between 1996 and October 2024 described the object as an “orb, round, sphere.” That makes it the second most commonly reported shape, behind lights, which account for 46%.

AARO’s investigations also show that many unusual sightings eventually turn out to have conventional explanations. Among resolved cases, 75% were identified as balloons, 16% as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), a category that includes drones, and 6% as birds. The remaining cases involved aircraft, satellites or other explanations.

Drones are particularly relevant to these investigations because their appearance and movement can be difficult to interpret when they are recorded at a distance. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses the term UAS — Unmanned Aircraft Systems — and regulates their operation throughout U.S. airspace.

Los Angeles has also seen an expanding use of drones by public agencies. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) operates a Drone as First Responder program for certain police responses. There is no LAPD report connecting those drones to the sphere recorded by FOX 11.

In this case, the sphere’s distance from the camera, altitude, speed and actual size are not known. There has also been no official identification classifying it as a drone, balloon, aircraft or another type of object.

AARO maintains a public database of official UAP imagery showing how some of these cases are investigated. Objects initially reported as UAP have later been identified as balloons after analysts compared their direction and speed with wind conditions. Other cases have been identified as birds based on flight behavior and information captured by sensors.

Some cases remain unresolved even when considerably more information is available. In one 2024 case from the Middle East, AARO received 6 minutes and 42 seconds of infrared footage captured by a U.S. military platform, yet the available information was still insufficient to conclusively identify what had been recorded.

For now, the Los Angeles sphere has a much simpler status: the footage is real, it went viral, and the object has not been publicly identified. Drones, balloons and birds are among the known explanations for sightings with similar characteristics, but none has been officially established as the explanation for the object caught during the FOX 11 broadcast.