I'm not saying it was aliens but...

Starlink. The sun-you-satellite angle has to be pretty perfect for you to get the reflection off the panels. It makes sense that if there are multiple satellites in crossing orbits at similar altitudes that you would see each in turn as they passed through the “reflection zone” for your location. This could appear to the observer as a single or several lights changing direction at some angle.
 
A couple months back I, Cargolux and Delta all witness an unexplained phenomenon over the AR routes east of Carolinas in the very wee early morning hours. 1 to 4 lights that would change in intensity and had movement. I originally thought I was witnessing a military exercise and the variable lights were hornets going in and out of burner. New York center confirmed no military in the area that we were reporting.
 
I've seen this multiple times on redeyes from the west coast to the east coast. Usually 020-050 heading if I had to guess. The first time I saw it I actually was talking my FO asking if he had head about this stuff or seen it. This was back in December. We watched them for about an hour, even had the FAs come up to check it out.


Usually see them over the middle of the continent, 0200-0300 local time if I had to guess. The first time was SEA-IAD, over eastern Idhao & Wyoming. Saw them again over west of Denver on another redeye from SMF to IAD.

Came back from a Hawaii vacation a little over a week ago, HNL-IAD. I couldn't sleep and was starring out the window and started picking them up at about the 10 oclock position from a window seat in E+. This was southwest of Kansas City by about 100 miles if I had to guess. They stuck around long enough for me to wake up my gf so she could see them too. Initially it was just bright lights, fading in and out. Then we saw one move in the racetrack pattern.

Very interesting and odd that we've started seeing these all of a sudden...I can't remember ever seeing something like it as an FO, although most of the Captains I flew with turned the dome light on full bright climbing through 10k :rolleyes:
 
N519AT said:
Very interesting and odd that we've started seeing these all of a sudden...I can't remember ever seeing something like it as an FO, although most of the Captains I flew with turned the dome light on full bright climbing through 10k :rolleyes:
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satellites have been around for decades. The starlink is as @BobDDuck posted. Somehow seems, different?
 
Saw a yuuuuuge bigly starlink train coming home from BFI the other night. Was trippy but def not what’s being described in the OP
 
BobDDuck said:
A lot of us have seen the odd racetrack type lights at night, generally to the northeast. Spent about an hour watching them last night coming back from Japan and actually got some interesting pictures of them. The RO and I were talking about it and the consensus seems to be we hope that it gets figured out what they are sometime, but in the meantime it's kind of cool to look at and wonder about.

This is a composite of 4 images, each with a 5 second exposure. I have a 2 second delay on my shutter (so don't introduce motion when I take my finger of the shutter button) so the gaps in the lines are the space between each exposure. The jittery images (blue and reddish) are stars (somebody who better understands light waves can explain why they tint that way... something about the bandwidths of each part of the color spectrum). The mostly horizontal image is a what a normal starlink (I think?) satellite looks like, with constant brightness. There are three vertical light trails in the shot. The two dimmer ones were not visible to the naked eye, and I only saw them when I was compositing the image. The super bright one was very noticeable. It traveled downward. It was visible above the starting point in this image (I just didn't get the camera capturing fast enough to get anything prior), but faded out of sight suddenly at the end.
View attachment 70716

This is also a composite of 4 images, each with a 5 second exposure and 2 seconds between each image. It has been brightened a bunch and was shot at 3200 ISO to begin with. There are a whole bunch (8 I can count) parallel light streaks in the horizontal, and then one horizontal light streak that isn't parallel with the others. There are several vertical light streaks, but the obvious bright one was the only thing visible to the naked eye. Again, it changed in brightness over the course of the capture with it being super bright for about 4 seconds in the middle. The blur and candy corn looking thing on the left side of the image is reflections from inside the cockpit.
View attachment 70715
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Saw some of this weird stuff last night over TX
 
inigo88 said:
Here’s a replay from one that happened over the pacific with LA Center about 5 months ago.

There are a lot of others like this on YouTube from the last 6 months or so - Southwest in Memphis, and a curious Salt Lake Center controller who had been hearing these reports for days and was determined to crack the case.

If it is Starlink and the rotation is an optical illusion I’d be curious to know how it works (like multiple satellites on converging courses flaring and un-flaring at just the right times?). There are a couple of smartphone satellite tracking apps you can download, I think mine was like $5. Worth the money to rule out ET, plus it’s fun to get a better idea of what you’re looking at when you see a satellite streak by. :)
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See, even he couldn't resist.

1680899217734.png
 
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
Aliens? :rolleyes: Right. They mastered intergalactic travel and thought, “let’s troll this species and see what they think of our vehicles.”
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The flaw in this thinking is that in whatever interstellar society there may be, that whatever government that exists has a monopoly on space travel.

It could be a free for all, some portion of that society has their own ride, and them coming down to troll us is some interstellar version of cow-tipping. Trespassing? Sure. Illegal, at least by their rules? Maybe. Do some get away with it? Almost certainly.
 
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