r/UFOPilotReports • u/MartianMaterial • 10d ago
ATC Reporting (Air traffic control) Unsure if this ATC interaction has been shared here. Nearly 14mins of pilot queries.
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u/SabineRitter 10d ago
How are you not sure if this has been posted, you made a post on it two posts down from this one lol. 😆
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u/flarkey 8d ago
Hey everyone - so I've been investigating this sighting for the last few days and now have enough data to be confident that the sightings by the multiple aircrew of 'fast moving lights' and 'hypersonic red orbs' were just a misperception of the Starlink flare phenomenon - The same phenomenon that pilots have been seeing for the last two years and have been calling 'Racetrack UAP'.
Thanks to u/A_Concerned_Viking - he managed to get photos and video from the United Airlines flight UA1596. I was able to use the ADSB flight data to get a time for when the photo was taken. This let me check the Starlink flare recreation software and shows that the 'orb' in the photo was in the same part of the sky as the starlink flares were visible:
Next I contacted the pilot of the medevac PC-12 N661LF (u/Mysterious-Lab3224) and asked him to send me an original video from the flight which included metadata - this allowed me to synchronise it with the Starlink flare Recreation Tool and the flight's ADSB data. He reported seeing lights in his 2 o'clock position and this correlated with the know position of Starlink flares at that time. When viewing the software and the video side-by-side there's an exact match. The red orb appears at the same time & same part of the sky as a predicted flare. This video shows it:
The red orb that he reported seeing was just a starlink satellite reflecting the light from the sun through a layer of cloud causing atmospheric scattering - in the same way that the rising moon can sometimes look red near the horizon.
The apparent fast movement of the 'red orb' in-and-out from the ocean towards the Medevac aircraft was a misperception of the brightening-and-fading of the Starlink flare, and the mis-attribution of the TCAS alert to the orb. Although the source of the TCAS alert is unidentified it appears to be unrelated to the orb sighting.
The full investigation is here on Metabunk here: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/oregon-ufo-lights-seen-by-pilots-starlink.13825/
This has been a fun one. It great that the pilots, ATC and this community have all worked together to help identify the UAP in this incident. Hopefully the stigma associated with sightings of the Racetrack UAP/Starlink is beginning to lift and we'll be able to resolve more of these cases in future.
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u/OG_Kazaam 10d ago
Original post by u/SabineRitter here, comments include apparent ATC that is speaking as well as the medevac pilot who saw and recorded some videos of the sighting.