Of all the drone reports logged around Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in December 2024, one stands out for the wrong reason: an aircrew said something shaped like a black cube passed about 500 feet beneath them at 16,000 feet.
The detail comes from Federal Aviation Administration records that The Black Vault obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request (case 2025-04622) and published in August 2025. The pages are drawn mostly from SKYWATCH, an FAA system that collects reports of suspicious or unauthorized aerial activity from control towers, regional offices, and the Domestic Events Network. For anyone who follows UFO and UAP stories, the cube is the strangest line in a dataset that was already odd.
What the FAA Logged Around the Base
The first entry is dated December 14, 2024, at 03:55 Zulu. Controllers reported a drone over several sensitive spots on the base, including the Hot Cargo Ramp, the south side of Runway 5L, the military ramp, and the east side of the airfield. Base security told controllers the drones were turning their lights off and flying past security personnel at close range.
The airfield was closed through two NOTAMs, M1132/24 and M1133/24, and the closure stayed in place until base leadership met later that morning.
Three days later the reports got bigger. On December 17, tower radar showed multiple targets that were presumed to be drones, although nobody confirmed them visually, and the Riverside Police Department was notified. Minutes later, ZID Center radar picked up between seven and seventeen targets within 40 miles of the airport. Security Forces on the ground confirmed they were drones, and the report categorized the event as a swarm.
Later that same day, a pilot on approach reported a silver drone about five nautical miles southeast of the base at 3,200 feet. The pilot took no evasive action.
The Black Cube Report
On December 19, at 18:45 Zulu, the crew of a westbound aircraft at 16,000 feet near the Appleton VOR reported a drone passing beneath them by about 500 feet. They described it as a black cube. The Appleton VOR sits roughly 70 to 80 miles east-northeast of Wright-Patterson, and the FAA assigned coordinates that place the sighting well east of the base. Because it happened inside the same week, it was logged in the same SKYWATCH dataset.
Two things make this entry hard to ignore. The first is altitude. Most of the December incidents involved drones flying at heights that fit hobbyist or small commercial systems, and 16,000 feet does not. The second is the paper trail. The sighting appears in the FAA’s public Drone Sightings Near Airports list, but without the black cube description, which The Black Vault says was either removed or simply left out. The cube also does not appear in the earlier Air Force FOIA release about the base incursions (case 2025-01757-F).
What Is and Is Not Established
It is worth being careful here. The December 14 and 17 events were tied directly to the base, with Security Forces confirming drones and the airfield shutting down. The cube was not. It was reported by an aircrew, plotted far from the base, and, as far as the published summary shows, was not backed by video or a radar track of the object itself.
A skeptic would point out that judging shape and distance from a moving aircraft is difficult, and that a fast pass at 500 feet is the kind of brief glimpse that invites misidentification. A believer would answer that trained aircrew are not in the habit of inventing cube-shaped objects, and that the FAA did not throw the report out.
Why This One Lingers
Drone swarms over a military installation are alarming on their own, and the records show the base treated them seriously enough to close its airfield. The cube adds a different question: whether anything at altitude was behaving like the small drones near the ground, or something else entirely. Nobody has answered that publicly, and the missing line in the FAA’s public list does not help.
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