PORTLAND, Oregon – Multiple pilots reported strange, red circular lights zipping around in the sky during flights over Oregon last weekend, according to audio, reports and federal aviation officials.
In air traffic control audio archived from Saturday, Dec. 7, pilots and air traffic control discuss the moving lights near Eugene.
“Is there any military activity out straight ahead of us?” a pilot using the callsign “UA1596,” identifying himself as the pilot of a United Airlines flight from Denver to Eugene, asked air traffic control about 9 minutes into the recording.
“No, we’re not seeing anything,” responded the air traffic controller.
“I had another one report at 30,000 feet in the Eugene area,” she continued. “We’re not sure what it is.”
“Yeah,” the pilot replied, “there’s lots of movement out there.”
“They’re looking into it,” air traffic control replied.
“We’re seeing three or four targets,” the pilot said a few moments later. “They’re all altitudes. Up and down. It’s pretty crazy.”
The pilot describes the lights “shooting way up” into the range of 50,000 feet.
According to an analysis by Newsweek, the URL on the recording indicates that the recording began at 4.30 a.m. on Dec. 8 in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) or 8:30 p.m., Dec. 7 Pacific Time. The codes indicate the Eugene Airport and the Seattle Air Route Traffic Control Center.
Later on in the recording, a second pilot, identified by the callsign “MEDEVAC,” spots the lights and says one is moving in “a corkscrew pattern.”
A few minutes later, asked for more details, the pilot said it looked like “an aircraft strobe.”
Then, the medevac pilot said, “Just had another one show up.”
The new light he reported as “zipping towards us and back out towards the ocean, red in color, moving at extreme speeds. I don’t even know how to describe it.”
“You are cleared to maneuver as necessary left and right to avoid the UFO out there,” another air traffic controller told him.
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The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed at least one of these sightings in a statement, saying, “A pilot reported seeing unidentified lights while flying in Seattle Air Route Traffic Control Center airspace on Saturday, Dec. 7.”
So, what were the lights above Oregon over the weekend?
The FAA gave no further details in their report, but a scientist who researched a similar incident in 2022, Douglas Buettner, told KGW that the lights appear “to be Starlink satellites, most likely.”
A November report from the Pentagon on unidentified anomalous phenomena, the government’s term for unidentified flying objects, revealed hundreds of new incidents of people seeing unidentified things in the sky.
Sometimes, officials say, these reports can be linked to Starlink, which only began launching satellites five years ago. Since it’s a relatively new technology and can be visible to the naked eye, many people do not recognize Starlink when they see it in the night sky.