Late on the night of Sunday April 30, 2023 a streak of light crossed the sky over the American Southwest. In Las Vegas it was bright enough to register on the body-worn camera of a Metropolitan Police officer who happened to be looking up at about 11:50 p.m. The American Meteor Society logged the sighting as fireball event 2408-2023, with reports from witnesses in eastern California, Nevada and Utah. On its own that would have been a routine entry in the society’s fireball log. What made it a story was a telephone call about forty minutes later.
What happened
A man in the northwest part of the Las Vegas valley rang 911 and told the dispatcher that his family had watched something fall from the sky into their backyard, and that two things were now moving around out there. He described them as very large, eight to ten feet tall, with big eyes and a big mouth, and insisted that they were not human. He also said, more than once, that the call was not a joke and that the family was terrified. The police call log, later obtained by the local station KLAS-TV, records that several other members of the household confirmed the sighting to the dispatcher. A teenage son, Angel Kenmore, who was sixteen at the time, made his own call describing beings with shiny eyes that were not human.
Two officers were sent. Body-camera video from both was released to KLAS in June 2023 and shows the drive out, the arrival roughly half an hour after the call, and the interviews in the driveway. One officer admits on the way that he is nervous, because he himself had just seen a shooting star and now someone was reporting aliens. At the house a witness tells him the thing was a big creature more than ten feet tall, and another says he had never believed in such things until that night. The officers are polite and plainly take the family’s fear seriously. The portion of footage recorded inside the backyard was blacked out by the department, which cited privacy law. As the officers leave, one jokes that the family should not call again if the nine-foot beings come back.
The investigation
Metro kept the case open for several days and then closed it without a finding. KLAS’s investigative team reported that unnamed sources believed something had probably come down in the yard and been recovered later, and the station’s drone footage showed a circular mark in the dirt. Nothing was ever produced to show what the mark was or who, if anyone, had recovered anything. Spokespeople for nearby Nellis and Creech air force bases said they had no involvement, and the Pentagon did not answer the station’s questions.
The meteor side of the story was far better documented. Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society told NewsNation that the society was certain the streak was a meteor: 21 witnesses had reported it, most of them estimating two to five seconds of visibility, which is far too brief for re-entering space debris and typical of a natural fireball. A fireball that bright normally burns up tens of kilometers above the ground, and nobody reported hearing the sonic boom that would accompany a fragment reaching the surface in a city of two million people.
The explanations
Two separate events were joined in the family’s account. The first, the fireball, is real and has a conventional explanation. The second, the creatures, rests entirely on the testimony of one household, taken within minutes of a startling sight at midnight in a dark yard. The officers’ cameras recorded frightened people, but they did not record anything in the yard that the department felt able to release, and no neighbor reported creatures of any kind. Skeptics pointed out that false 911 reports are a felony in Nevada, carrying one to four years in prison, and that the family was never charged, which suggests the police did not believe they were lying so much as mistaken.
The family’s own interpretation has shifted over time. In June 2023, with trespass signs around the house and threats arriving online, the Kenmores told NewsNation they stood by every word. In April 2024 Angel Kenmore, by then seventeen, gave his first long interview and said he had looked at a giant creature for about thirty seconds, had felt unable to move, and had closed his eyes and prayed for it to go away. He no longer called it an alien; he thought it might have been a demon, adding that only God knew. He said he had made no money from the story and had never wanted the attention.
Where it stands
The body-camera footage, the 911 recording and the meteor society’s log are all public, which is unusual for a case of this kind and is why it traveled so far. They establish that a fireball crossed the sky and that a family rang the police in genuine distress. They do not establish that anything landed, and no physical evidence has been produced in the years since. The most economical reading is that a bright meteor, a dark yard and a frightened household produced a sincere misperception. The case remains a favorite of UFO podcasts, and the house on the northwest side of Las Vegas became a brief tourist attraction, to the family’s dismay.