United States.Flights over the U.S. · an airline pilot films white lights

In March 2024 the FBI interviewed a commercial airline pilot, also a military reservist, who had been referred to the Bureau by a third party; his name and that of the person who referred him are redacted in the record. He spoke of two things more than twenty years apart: white lights he had been seeing since October 2023 on night flights, and a triangle he saw in Afghanistan in 2002.

According to the pilot, since October 2023 a lot of pilots had been seeing the same thing, lights in the sky, and discussing it among themselves over a channel whose name is redacted. They typically saw them between midnight and 3 a.m., though he did not know whether that was because it was dark enough to see them then or because that was when the lights were present.

His first observation came in October 2023, flying from Boston to Dublin, Ireland: he saw the lights to the northeast, toward Gander, Canada. He was at 37,000 feet and believed the lights were higher, probably at 50,000 feet or more. They were white, started out dim, grew brighter and then faded out gradually, in a full cycle of anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute. They looked like airplane landing lights, but he knew they were not, nor did he think they were Starlink, Starlink flares, satellites or meteors. Between one and four appeared at a time; some stayed in place and others moved in straight lines, sometimes changing direction, and they generally did not move in a coordinated way.

Since then he saw them about ten times. At times they would disappear for minutes before returning. He watched them for stretches of 45 minutes to two hours, in every direction except south: three times toward North Dakota while flying to Seattle or Phoenix, and also off the west coast and the mid-Atlantic coast. He did not know how far away they were but ventured 200 to 500 miles. He never saw them below the horizon, and had not heard of them before October 2023.

On a flight in February 2024 he recorded them on his Samsung Galaxy S22 phone, from the cockpit with the lights turned off. He was about 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis, flying east, and saw the lights to the north, in the North Dakota region, at around 4:36 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, on a clear night. He said they were brighter in person than on camera and at an elevation similar to his own or slightly higher. The video shows white lights, sometimes ten or more at once, moving in straight lines and getting brighter and dimmer. At the 3:27 mark he was not sure whether two lights were very close together or a single light with a tail; at 3:47, whether there were three separate lights. At 5:22 the flight panel is visible: the plane was traveling at about Mach 0.80, 40 to 50 miles northeast of Sioux Falls, with that city's airport (KFSD) visible on radar. He never felt unsafe and did not believe the lights were within 100 miles of him.

The other sighting took place in June 2002, when he was activated as a reservist and sent to Afghanistan. One night he was outside looking at the stars with another pilot when, at about 4:30 a.m. local time, he noticed the stars being blacked out over Bagram: something huge was passing overhead, from west to east, shaped like an equilateral triangle. It moved silently, at constant speed and altitude, possibly 150 knots, with no lights visible. He estimated it at 500 feet in size, though he could not see its full shape. The other pilot also saw it and, as it passed over them, said: "did you see that?" He did not discuss the sighting with anyone else afterward or hear of anyone else discussing it, and looking through the available information later, he found nothing that explained what he saw.

Closing the interview, the pilot said that not much was being said openly about the lights among pilots: he did not think there was as much stigma as people assume, but that people were just not used to talking about it.

What the pilot describes of the lights (white points that brighten and fade in cycles of seconds to a minute, several at once, moving in straight lines without coordination, always at night and above the horizon) recalls low-orbit satellites, which become visible for moments when they catch the Sun; AARO, the Pentagon office that studies these cases, released an official animation on those flares. The pilot ruled out Starlink, Starlink flares, other satellites and meteors at the time, and no source on these sightings proposes another identification. But ruling them out by eye is not the same as checking with instruments, and the absence of a published analysis is not evidence against an ordinary cause.

The February 2024 video is the strongest part of the statement, because it shows the flight panel with the aircraft's speed and position (Mach 0.80, near Sioux Falls) and so fixes where and when the lights were recorded.

The Bagram triangle rests on two witnesses alone, with no photo or instrument record, and reached the FBI some twenty-two years after it happened.