Claim: 13 people witness UFO at Red Rock Arena Colorado [Starlink]

jarlrmai

Senior Member.
[ADMIN UPDATE: This appears to be Starlink, see: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/cl...ock-arena-colorado-starlink.13524/post-318663 ]
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https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=181776

https://nypost.com/2024/06/29/us-news/dozen-spot-ufo-soaring-above-red-rocks-amphitheater/

External Quote:
Occurred: 2024-06-05 01:00 Local
Reported: 2024-06-05 10:43 Pacific
Duration: about 30 seconds
No of observers: 12

Location: Golden, CO, USA
Location details: North of Red Rocks about a mile or so, hovering above the treetops on the hog's back ridge.

Shape: Disk
Color: Dark metallic
Estimated Size: Several hundred feet long
Viewed From: Land
Direction from Viewer: North
Angle of Elevation: 7
Closest Distance: About a mile or so
Estimated Speed: It hovered in place and then moved 5-10mph east.
Characteristics: Lights on object

We saw a large disc shaped craft with three levels of windows. It hovered silently and then disappeared into thin air.

I was working at Red Rocks Amphitheater last night when one of our coworkers suddenly said to us, "Hey, what is that over there? It looks like a spaceship." We all turned to look in the direction he was pointing and sure enough, there was a UFO hovering about a half a mile to a mile north of red rocks. A dozen of us saw it. We all kept asking each other, "Are you seeing this too?" It was a resounding "yes" from everyone in the group.

What we saw was a classic disc shaped metallic craft that was several hundred yards long. It had three levels of windows, almost like really long 3 story office building. This thing was totally silent. It didn't make a sound. What's even crazier is that as soon as we all started noticing it and stopped what we were doing to pay attention to it, the craft tipped at an angle and slowly started moving belly-first to the east. Then it started fading away until it was invisible. It didn't shoot off into the distance. It simply dissolved into the ether. We all watched it vanish.

This was not a plane. It wasn't a satellite, a drone, or anything like that. There was no mistaking what this was: We all saw a giant disc shaped craft hovering a few hundred feet above the ground with three rows of windows and lights. Then we all saw it fade into nothing as soon as it knew it was being watched.
There were a dozen other people who saw it with me.
Reddit thread with the person who saw it replying to questions


Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1dra4wk/12_witnesses_spot_ufo_soaring_above_red_rocks/?ref=share&ref_source=link


There is no video

I asked where exactly the sighting was from and got this reply

External Quote:
We were on the loading dock across the road from the Trading Post building. We were looking off the back of the dock over the back railing towards the NE.
I went there in Google Earth and in the exact direction they were looking at 1 mile (in the distances you state) from the place they were looking from a road crosses the ridge.

It's possible they saw a large lit up truck or some large moving heavy plant, like a crane or other large construction/farming vehicle etc, often moved at night to avoid traffic.

If it were going up hill it would be tipped up and moving to the east would have it going around the bend and vanishing as it was occluded by the ridge.

Is anyone aware of any requirement to report/log large vehicle movements in the US/Colorado?
 
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Reddit thread with the person who saw it replying to questions

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1dqts7o/ufo_sighting_reported_at_red_rocks_in_colorado/


Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1dra4wk/12_witnesses_spot_ufo_soaring_above_red_rocks/

(quotes in the OP)

report allegedly filed by
https://www.reddit.com/user/Lemonator8976/
External Quote:
I'm the person who made the original report to the UFO database. I was on the loading dock that night and saw the craft that was hovering.
 
Direction from Viewer: North
Angle of Elevation: 7
Closest Distance: About a mile or so
Estimated Speed: It hovered in place and then moved 5-10mph east.
We were on the loading dock across the road from the Trading Post building. We were looking off the back of the dock over the back railing towards the NE.

Here's the dock, looking NE.
2024-06-29_12-52-42.jpg


And North:

2024-06-29_12-53-40.jpg
 

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The angle of elevation 7 is oddly specific. But it is also above the ridge, which is around 2° Up, and the hill is under 3°
 
Going by the rule of "The first thing they say it definitely was not is probably what it was, I'm guessing it was a plane -- that would at least match the rows of windows, but otherwise it does not match well. A train might be better, but I don't see any train tracks, unless I'm missing them.

A look at the map shows some interesting possible sources for lights about a mile north, so in the right place...
capture 2.JPG

I see a Miner's Maze Adventure Park (does not seem to be packed with tall lights, but they could have had some sort of event), a big aggregate quarry, a Harley Davidson dealer, a big highway interchange, a sports complex... But unsure how any of that translates into a disk several hundred feet across! It may be worth noting that the area a mile north should be crammed with potential witnesses, right under this several-hundred-feet-across disk...

Oh, and this, some sort of go-cart or dirt bike track east of the quarry, but it looks like it is behind a hill from the amphitheater...
Capture.JPG

There is a trail up to, and then along, that ridge, so activity up there is possible.



NOTES ON THE "LOADING DOCK?"
EDIT: Lengthy search for possible loading dock removed, while I was thrashing around Mick was posting the correct answer!

Finally, there is the Red Rock Trading Post:
red rock trading post loading.JPG

It does not have a dedicated loading dock that I can find from Google Earth Street View, it looks from this image as though vendors just park and hand-truck goods to where they need to be. View north from here:
view n from tp parking.JPG


(leaving those pics as they may be useful.)
 
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Here's the dock, looking NE.
@Mick West Do we know that's the dock referred to? It looks like the parking lot in front of the trading post. If you're sure that's the right one, I can trim my post above by a large amount, as the other sites can be omitted!

Edit to add: Thanks jarlmai, I've edited my post! So much lost verbiage!)
 
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Why does it say..

Location: Golden, CO, USA

...which is actually about 6 miles north of Red Rocks Ampitheatre.
 
Why does it say..

Location: Golden, CO, USA

...which is actually about 6 miles north of Red Rocks Ampitheatre.

Likely it's just the nearest major city. The Ampitheater is technically in Morrison CO, but most Americans would more likely have heard of nearby Golden. It's home of Coors beer:

1720657461747.png


Just as a side note, it's often pronounced more like "kerrs" with kind of a sneer and not a southern accent, but more of a generic Red Neck drawl: "Kerrs, t'aint no downstream beerrr!"

More interestingly is the claim that 13 people saw this UFO. So far sounds a lot like the Stephensville TX UFO flap. The usual story is that "100s or people saw a UFO bigger than a WalMart". While lots of people did see what was certainly some F16s training nearby, the "100s" and "bigger than a WalMart" came from one guy. HE claimed what he saw was huge and that in talking to the mayor and other town people, at least a 100 or more agreed with him.

He never brings these people up or gives names, just repeats that he talked to "100s" of people that saw what he saw. Nearly none of the other dozen or so witness statements that do exists align with his, but as he first got into the paper and then got on TV and is often the go to guy for more current TV UFO shows, he just repeats the claim.

I've seen this story pop up on my news feed repeatedly now, always with the 12-13 witnesses, but unless I'm missing something, that number is based solely on the guy telling the story. There aren't 12 other reports like this guy's, right? It's just one guy saying there were 12 other witnesses at this point.
 
If it was an airplane, the row of windows is much more likely to be a row of landing lights.

-Landing lights are much brighter.
-Windows are prominent when passing across the line of sight of a witness, landing lights are most prominent when heading along the line of sight/directly toward the witness
-The later is more consistent with the hovering illusion

If... this were an aircraft, I'd put a C-130 Hercules at the the top of the suspects list.

Remember this case?
 
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Sorry I've been all over the place with this regarding the date. Turns out the date was actually 5 June - the witness confirmed it was after the All Time Low gig on 4 June. Not after the Ian Munsick gig as stated in the linked NYP article, which was on the evening of the 5th, which would have made the sighting the morning of the 6th.

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https://www.redrocksonline.com/events/all-time-low-520477/

The witness said the UFO a fog around it...


Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1dqts7o/comment/lava79j/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Could it have been a rocket launch in an out-gassing stage? They are often described as having a fog around them? He also said ....


Heading east - dissapearing? Could it have been an illuminated rocket launch that entered the earth's shadow and disappeared? Or Starlink flaring brightly?

There was a SpaceX launch of the Starlink G8-5 group a few hours before the sighting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_launches_in_January–June_2024#June


Here's a link to the group's orbital data, but I think this is the most up-to-date data.
https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/supplemental/table.php?FILE=starlink-g8-5

Epoch of the files available at the above link is 24193.07479167, which is 11 July 2024, so not suitable for a sitrec recreation. We need the Pre-launch TLEs.
https://mason.gmu.edu/~mlyons3/tle_epoch.html
 
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So, I found the G8-5 prelaunch TLE data (text file attached)... https://www.celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/supplemental/sup-gp.php?FILE=starlink-g8-5&FORMAT=tle

STARLINK-G8-5 STACK
1 72000C 24107A 24157.13036829 .00038472 00000+0 80371-4 0 03
2 72000 53.1627 185.0931 0009719 281.7470 301.9780 15.98181081 18
STARLINK-G8-5 SINGLE
1 72001C 24107B 24157.13036829 .00982261 00000+0 20161-2 0 07
2 72001 53.1626 185.0931 0009754 281.5171 302.2078 15.98181664 14

The TLE Epoch converter confirms the validity time as 5th June : https://mason.gmu.edu/~mlyons3/tle_epoch.html


Denver is UTC -6... so the sighting was at 0700UTC.

I put the TLE into Sitrec, set the location to South West Denver, and set the time to 5 June 2024 at 0700am UTC - and looked north. The Starlink G8-5 group is exactly where the witness saw the UFO and moving in the same direction. And not only would the Starlink stack have been visible at that exact time - there would have been a bright flare off the newly launched satellites.

1720694430506.png

Permalink: https://www.metabunk.org/u/S7CKMc.html

This video from Jalisco, Mexico of a newly launch starlink train flaring is probably what it would have looked like.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFthKmUeU34&ab_channel=NintendoGameDude

More details of the witness's description, which could match descriptions of a tightly packed Starlink train

Note that he says:
"There were 20 give or take a few"
....the Starlink G8-5 launch contained 20 satellites.

Comparison of the Jalisco Starlink Train and the witness's sketch....
1720698965738.png


It seems that Starlink strikes again!
 

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So, I found the G8-5 prelaunch TLE data (text file attached)... https://www.celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/supplemental/sup-gp.php?FILE=starlink-g8-5&FORMAT=tle



Denver is UTC - 6...
View attachment 69996

I put the TLE into Sitrec, set the location to South West Denver, and set the time to 5 June 2024 at 0700am UTC - and looked north. The Starlink G8-5 group is exactly where the witness saw the UFO and moving in the same direction. And not only would the Starlink stack have been visible at that exact time - there would have been a bright flare off the newly launched satellites.

View attachment 69995
Permalink: https://www.metabunk.org/u/S7CKMc.html

This video from Jalisco, Mexico of a newly launch starlink train flaring is probably what it would have looked like.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFthKmUeU34&ab_channel=NintendoGameDude

More details of the witness's description:

View attachment 69997

....the Starlink G8-5 launch contained 20 satellites.

View attachment 69999

It seems that Starlink strikes again!

This is great debunking but are you investigating a different case to the original one, do we need a split?
 
This is great debunking but are you investigating a different case to the original one, do we need a split?
No the Jalisco case was already debunked as Starlink. It was the one that started the whole 'Starlink flare' craze. I just posted it as an example of bright flares from a very recent launch.

 
I put the TLE into Sitrec, set the location to South West Denver, and set the time to 5 June 2024 at 0700am UTC - and looked north. The Starlink G8-5 group is exactly where the witness saw the UFO and moving in the same direction. And not only would the Starlink stack have been visible at that exact time - there would have been a bright flare off the newly launched satellites.
Which raises the question, "If the UFO was NOT the Starlink launch, would they not have ALSO seen the launch? If there was actually one UFO there, whould they not have reported two strange sighting in the sky, the UFO and the launch"
 
Which raises the question, "If the UFO was NOT the Starlink launch, would they not have ALSO seen the launch? If there was actually one UFO there, whould they not have reported two strange sighting in the sky, the UFO and the launch"
The recently launched Starlink train would have been visible, each satellite would have flared like the Jalisco sighting. The Witness reported a cloudless night and stars were visible, so there would have been no obscuration of things in space.

It might be worth while recreating the Jalisco sighting in Sitrec - it occurred well before @Mick West started work on it.
 
I wish there were a way we could put starlink views in the Google Earth terrain..

Or have sitrec have Google Earth terrain.
There is terrain in there, I just need to combine some features of the NightSky/Starlink tool and the Custom tool.

Not street-view level terrain, but enough to get terrain contours.
 
Then we all saw it fade into nothing as soon as it knew it was being watched.
What was it scared of?

Being seen?

So why did it present itself?

Obviously there's no way of knowing what it knew so I think it's safe to call this bit out as story telling. A lazy trope too.
 
I asked the witness on Reddit if his sighting looked like the Jalisco sighting and he said it did not.
It might be worth asking, if it can be done without sounding too snarky (I think I probably sound too snarky here--->) how the UFO compared with the Starlinks in roughly the same part of the sky at the same time.
 
What was it scared of?

Being seen?

So why did it present itself?

Obviously there's no way of knowing what it knew so I think it's safe to call this bit out as story telling. A lazy trope too.

Not just "Being seen?" but "Being seen by *you*?" If it's got lights, others elsewhere would have seen it before, surely, but it didn't disappear after that lot saw it, only after you saw it. So it evolves from mere story telling to FanFic, where you somehow play an important role.

The whole situation's certainly packed full of tropes of various types, patterns and anti-patterns. There's definitely some /post hoc ergo propter hoc/ going on, and definitely some personification (these objects displayed awareness and reasoning capabilities). But it's a special kind of /post hoc/ reasoning - only paying attention to the data point that you yourself gathered, despite it being entirely reasonable that others would be able to gather the equivalent datapoints at other times, and come up with a contradictory conclusion to you - is an interesting one. Psychologists would probably call that (a failure of) "perspective taking", which is closely related to Theory of Mind. I'm not sure there's a standard name for that fallacy. /Post me ergo propter me/, or just /Propter me/ would work, mimicking the usual phrase but pinning the pronoun to be the first person. Anyway, none of these are particularly unusual mistakes to make unless you specifically take care to avoid them.
 
There is terrain in there, I just need to combine some features of the NightSky/Starlink tool and the Custom tool.

Not street-view level terrain, but enough to get terrain contours.
Hmm, while it's a bit janky, the Night Sky stuff does actually work in the custom sitch tool, allowing me to set up a sitch with the terrain.

https://www.metabunk.org/u/lEHTgH.html

2024-07-12_08-52-57.jpg

2024-07-12_08-53-45.jpg
 
The witnesses said that the UFO was only visible for 30 seconds. I think its unlikely that the satellites would have been able to be seen at this elevation by diffuse illumination, but what sitrec shows and can quantify is the time that the satellites would have been flaring, making them very bright and visible.

Sitrec shows they would have been flaring from 07h01m08s UTC to 07h01m41s UTC = 33 seconds

Start of flaring:
1720860529723.png

End of flaring:
1720860315493.png

Would have looked something like this...
 

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What was it scared of?

Being seen?

So why did it present itself?

Obviously there's no way of knowing what it knew so I think it's safe to call this bit out as story telling. A lazy trope too.
I have to laugh at claims like theirs, "they knew we were watching".
Maybe it was you, maybe it was all those people on the other side of the hill, maybe it was passengers in a passing airliner, maybe, maybe...
Like they were the ONLY persons on the entire planet who could have been watching it?

Things like this pop up regularly in accounts, and that's to be expected, people are trying to understand what they just saw. These are the sorts of details that should be recorded, because that's what the observer thought at the time or just afterward. But they should not be taken as iron-clad truths. Just as estimates of the size of an object or how far away it was when the observer is not sure what the object is should be taken with a grain of salt. Human depth perception cannot distinguish between a bright light a hundred yards away and one a hundred miles away, but that does not stop the human brain from generating estimates. We are hard-wired to do so.
 
I have to laugh at claims like theirs, "they knew we were watching".
Maybe it was you, maybe it was all those people on the other side of the hill, maybe it was passengers in a passing airliner, maybe, maybe...
Like they were the ONLY persons on the entire planet who could have been watching it?

Things like this pop up regularly in accounts, and that's to be expected, people are trying to understand what they just saw. These are the sorts of details that should be recorded, because that's what the observer thought at the time or just afterward. But they should not be taken as iron-clad truths. Just as estimates of the size of an object or how far away it was when the observer is not sure what the object is should be taken with a grain of salt. Human depth perception cannot distinguish between a bright light a hundred yards away and one a hundred miles away, but that does not stop the human brain from generating estimates. We are hard-wired to do so.
The problem that us debunkers have is that we are often expected to explain every nuance of UFO sightings, and until we do then the sighting isn't debunked. This example of "how do you explain that it disappeared after we shone a torch at it" is typical of the things I often get asked by witnesses or ufo-fans. It's not necessary to explain everything a witness says, or claims, because frankly much of it is conjecture or assumption on their part.
 
I can always tell from the description that the witness 'believed' before they saw whatever they saw. The shibboleths (tic tac, orbs, pyramid, craft etc) and the phrasing (adding elements from classic sightings ) make it clear, I'll also check a reddit users post history to get some idea of what they might believe in. Also the unbelievably common classic, stating it couldn't be exactly what it turns out to be.

Then when I ask clarifying questions I often have to do so in a way that makes it sound like I am playing along otherwise they get "wise" to the fact that I am actually trying to debunk their special sighting and clam up or invent some new things that make the explanation.

It's like a game, they are convinced they saw an alien spaceship, but they feel they have to present it as if they are honestly looking for an explanation whilst at the same time making sure they present it in a away where it feels like there is no other explanation (than aliens) and I have to play the game of investigating it whilst looking like I am backing up the assertion that it couldn't be anything other than aliens.
 
Also the unbelievably common classic, stating it couldn't be exactly what it turns out to be.
I wonder if this is a subconscious thing to defend the specialness of the experience by "innoculating" against the subconsciously suspected actual answer, or is it a conscious effort to protect a cool story from what was realized during or after to be no big deal. I guess in terms of results and of debunking it makes little difference.... but I do wonder...
 
The problem that us debunkers have is that we are often expected to explain every nuance of UFO sightings, and until we do then the sighting isn't debunked. This example of "how do you explain that it disappeared after we shone a torch at it" is typical of the things I often get asked by witnesses or ufo-fans. It's not necessary to explain everything a witness says, or claims, because frankly much of it is conjecture or assumption on their part.
how do you explain that it disappeared after we shone a torch at it"

I'd run too if the natives showed up with torches!

;)
 
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