A US civilian airliner had a relatively close encounter with what appeared to be some sort of flying pulsing lights in the sky over North Carolina.
Details of the encounter, which took place on August 12, were shared online by prolific blogger Scott C. Waring, who immediately branded it a UFO sighting.
In the eyewitness account featured on Waring’s blog, the anonymous pilot – the only details he provided about himself were his occupation as “an airline pilot with a major airline in the United States” and his past experience as a military pilot – said the encounter occurred as the plane was flying approximately over the city of Wilmington, while en route from St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands to Dulles Airport in Virginia.
“At roughly 0055 ET I began seeing slow pulses of light in the sky directly in front of us (to our north). The pulses would last usually 8-10 seconds each and had gaps of darkness lasting anywhere from 10 seconds to over a minute,” the eyewitness account states. “They were slowly moving from left to right. The pulses would be gradual (start very dim and grow into a bright light about the brightness of Venus, and then fade away).”
The plane’s captain also noticed the light and he and the pilot engaged in a discussion about what they were looking at. The pilot also started filming and taking pictures at that point, with the video he recorded from the plane’s cockpit being featured in Waring’s blog post.
“We began seeing 2 lights at a time, often at different altitudes, but always moving generally from left to right when the pulse was at its peak. At one point we watched 2 lights flying in ‘formation,’ almost side by side,” the pilot recalled.
“For a brief time we saw 3 objects at one time. At no point did we see a strobe light or navigation lights on the objects,” he added. “The best way to describe what we saw is 2-3 aircraft circling in left hand turns with their landing lights on, which means that they were only clearly visible when the lights were facing towards us.”
While it wasn’t immediately clear what exactly the lights were, the pilot argued that they were not civilian aircraft, since few of those “can fly above 41,000 feet, and the objects were about 10 degrees above the horizon from our perspective.”
“I was not able to tell the distance of the object from our aircraft, but in the 35+ minutes we watched, they never seemed to get any closer even though we covered about 250 nautical miles in that time. For this reason I believe they were in either the upper atmosphere or in space,” the pilot explained.
He also argued that the lights did not look like a Starlink satellite “train,” and that they definitely were not military aircraft or flares.
Waring, however, exhibited little doubt about what the pilot saw, describing the video recorded by the latter as “amazing and rare footage of a real UFO.”
“This is 100 percent undeniable proof that UFOs are following jets and curious about those aboard them,” the blogger declared.