United States.The lights that have followed the transatlantic route for a year — and a triangle over Bagram, twenty years earlier

A commercial airline pilot, also an Air Force reservist, was interviewed by the FBI in March 2024 after being referred to the Bureau by a third party. His statement covers two entirely separate events, more than twenty years apart, but tied together by the same underlying pattern: anomalous aerial objects observed during flights, still unexplained despite the years that have passed.

The first, and the one that prompted the interview, is a recurring phenomenon the witness began observing in October 2023 and which, per his account, has been discussed openly among airline pilots over radio: white lights in the sky, typically between midnight and 3 AM — though the witness did not know whether that timing reflects when it's dark enough to see them, or whether the lights only appear in that window.

His first observation happened while flying from Boston to Dublin, Ireland, when he saw the lights to the northeast, toward Gander, Canada. He was at an altitude of 37,000 feet and believed the lights were higher, probably 50,000 feet or more. They were white, starting dim, brightening, then gradually fading, in a full cycle lasting anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute. They looked like airplane landing lights, but the witness ruled that out, along with Starlink, Starlink flares, satellites, or meteors. Between one and four appeared at a time; some stayed fixed in place, others moved in straight lines, sometimes changing direction, and generally did not move in a coordinated fashion.

Since that first sighting, the witness has seen the lights roughly ten more times. At times they would disappear for minutes before returning. He has observed 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 over the mid-Atlantic. He couldn't estimate the exact distance, but guessed 200 to 500 miles. He never saw them below the horizon, and had not heard of the phenomenon before October 2023.

During a flight in February 2024 he managed to capture video on his Samsung Galaxy S22 phone — filmed from the cockpit, with the cabin lights off — in which, per his description, the lights appeared brighter in person than on camera, at an elevation similar to his own or slightly higher. He was about 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis, flying east, when he spotted the lights to the north, in the North Dakota region, at around 4:36 AM Eastern Standard Time, on a clear night. The video shows as many as ten or more white lights present at once, moving in straight lines and varying in brightness. At the 3:27 mark it's unclear whether it's two lights very close together or a single one with a tail; at 3:47, it's unclear whether it's three separate lights. At the 5:22 mark the flight panel is visible, showing the aircraft traveling at approximately Mach 0.80 and located 40-50 miles northeast of Sioux Falls, with KFSD airport visible on radar — the kind of instrumental correlation that rarely accompanies reports like this. The witness never felt unsafe and did not believe the lights were within 100 miles of him.

The third event the witness described to the FBI happened twenty years earlier, in June 2002, when — activated as a reservist — he was deployed to Afghanistan. One night, standing outside looking at the stars with another pilot, at around 4:30 AM local time, he noticed the stars progressively blacking out over Bagram: something huge was crossing the sky from west to east, shaped like an equilateral triangle, moving silently, at a constant speed and altitude — possibly 150 knots — with no lights visible at all. He estimated its size at around 500 feet, though he couldn't fully make out its shape. The other pilot also saw it, and as it passed overhead exclaimed, "did you see that?" The witness never discussed the sighting with anyone else afterward, nor was he aware of anyone else discussing it. Looking through available information afterward, he never found anything that explained what he saw that night in Afghanistan.

At the close of the interview, the witness noted that, in his perception, the recurring-lights phenomenon isn't discussed much openly within the pilot community — not because of as much stigma as one might assume, but simply because people aren't used to talking about it.

The file brings together two very different evidentiary profiles under a single witness, and the corpus weighs them separately rather than averaging them. The recurring-lights phenomenon (2023-2024) anchors the posterior: it fits reasonably well with the recent boom in low-orbit satellite megaconstellations — freshly launched Starlink trains, solar-panel flares, reentries — which produce exactly the pattern the witness describes (brightness cycles from seconds to minutes, straight-line motion, multiple unsynchronized points). That pushes `mundano_natural` to 0.42 even though the witness himself explicitly ruled those hypotheses out at the time: ruling something out in the moment isn't the same as having verified it with instruments. What does set this file apart from a typical lights report is the February 2024 video, correlated against the flight panel (Mach 0.80, GPS/radar position near Sioux Falls) — an instrumental anchor most lights sightings lack, which narrows, without eliminating, the margin for perceptual error.

The second event — the 2002 Bagram triangle — is a supporting anecdote, not the core of the posterior: only two witnesses, no photograph or instruments, and twenty-two years between the event and its formal record. It fits pattern `8l` (large, silent triangle) alongside Hudson Valley, the Belgian wave, and several already-cataloged PURSUE files, but is treated here the same way the corpus already treated the Borland case's postscript: it adds color about the witness's credibility — a trained military pilot, with a second independent observer who reacted in the moment — but doesn't move the posterior with the same weight as the primary, documented, filmed event with this decade's instrumental corroboration.