Multiple UFOs Observed from South Brazil [Mostly Starlink]

Why do we think these Southern hemisphere flares are seemingly brighter (easily visible when only the brightest stars are) than the Northern hemisphere ones, needed night-vision to see them?
I'm not sure that's entirely true, as the JImmy Church Night Vision had stars in it that are visible to the naked eye, and at points the Starlink flared brighter than those stars.

The visible flares in Brazil seem less common in this video, perhaps because there are many not actually visible to the camera. This camera is also fairly aggressive in compression, which might effectively work as a cut-off filter, only showing the brighter ones.
 


32 seconds stariing ar 01:00:10

Once again, perfect match.
 
Brilliant. If anyone can come up with anything not covered by that, I will be gobsmacked, 100% watertight. Thank you.

In a bizarre cross-threading, a friend of a friend at my request reached out to friends of his friends to see if they had any input on the curious case of the Gemini 11 photo. Paths ran dry, except for no-new-bits "yeah, looks like a reflection" responses, but someone in the chain dropped a reference to the following, which I think is relevant to this thread (emphasis mine) from a self-proclaimed "pro-UFO analyst":

https://yarchive.net/space/politics/ufo_gemini11.html

From: jamesoberg@aol.com (JamesOberg)
Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors,alt.paranet.ufo,sci.space.policy,sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: CSICOP's UFO Subcommittee (was Re: Jim Oberg -- helpful suggestions)
Date: 7 Apr 1996 00:53:19 -0500

[...]

Meanwhile, I do encourage independent analysis efforts, untainted by any
material provided by me and hence potential accusable of being forged,
faked, or twisted by me. It has been lonely for twenty years appearing to
be the only person in the UFO field with the ability to do from-scratch
satellite tracking computations (Maccabee and Sparks, don't forget, used
data -I- had obtained). When I am asked for "independent support" of my
conclusions, what am I supposed to say, that nobody else even knows HOW to
attempt the analysis? Or that nobody else in the UFO field has bothered to
learn?

Nope, we need more interested people, because satellite tracking data has
been crucial to solving major UFO cases
around the world (US, Russia,
France, Middle East, China, Argentina, Nea Zealand, etc etc) that
otherwise would have remained "unexplained". Hmmm ... now that MIGHT
explain why pro-UFO folks really DON'T want to learn this art, it's too
heartbreaking to really solve favorite cases -- nah, that's too cynical
and cruel, it can't be true...

What do I think the Gemini-11 sighting was? Right now with what I've seen,
and considering all the evidence at my disposal, I'd say the following
odds express my view:
Proton-3 65%
Other manmade satellite 30%
Other spaceflight-related event 5%
Unexplainable stimulus <<< 1%

This application of satellite tracking computations to solving classic UFO
cases has been highly productive
and a lot of fun, and all I can say is,
if you're interested, get involved, because there's practically -NO-
knowledgeable work being done in the UFO world, they -NEED- the help. And
despite nastinesses here on the 'net by loud-mouthed know-it-all would-be
dragon-slayers, most serious ufologists of all persuasions appreciate
sound technical help.
Content from External Source
The work goes on, but at least we don't need to use slide rules any more.
Well done guys!
 
Odd I see screengrabs from Mick's videos in that video, I thought there would be a link but there isn't..
I thought there might have been at least a mention of Mick's name as a credit, or a link to Metabunk... but alas, it was not to be.
 
I thought there might have been at least a mention of Mick's name as a credit, or a link to Metabunk... but alas, it was not to be.
There's a link to another video, but I scanned that and saw nothing of Micks there. So it would interesting to know what is being talked about when the screengrabs are on screen, the translated version seems to be saying Starlink is the new irridium flares which is basically accurate, but the context is hard to get with bad translation.
 

I do.
First post here, just registered especially because of this convo. I'll introduce myself at the welcome thread in a minute, but I am Brazilian, currently living in the Midwest region of Brazil, so quite far from where these sighting are going on.
As for the guy in the video giving credit where it's due, the guy says he got information from a Gabriel Zaparolli and links his video (
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwkwNWzJt6c
), but it has nothing to do with the screen grabs from Mick's video. Mick is not mentioned or credited with anything. I'll leave a comment, but doubt he'll read it. There are almost 2.000 comments by now.

Zaparolli also explains on his video that those are satellite flares, but doesn't show it as clearly as Mick does.
 
I know I'll be repeating some information from another thread here, but bear with me, I have a few thoughts.

Brazilian media has been covering these sightings for a little over three weeks now, the first one I'm aware of was on October 22nd or 23rd. It was only the audio of a pilot describing it as, among other phrases, "it looks like the lights on an airplane doing a 360". The news broke on the 24th and, by then, I had seen Mick's first video on "racetrack UFOs" and figured these were the same phenomenon, given the latitude and description.

Although there have since been a few stories explaining it, with experts and at least one ufologist pointing out that these are satellite flares, I have been seeing A LOT of fans of the alien spaceship explanation who are refusing to get it on social media. The most common argument they use, time and time again, is that pilots are trained to recognize satellite flares and they wouldn't make this mistake. Which is, well, just fallacious, but if I point out that pilots make mistakes all the time, they act as if I'm offending the intelligence of the pilots.

What I have been thinking is, by now these flares are probably predictable. It is possible to know when and where to look for them. So what if we (and by "we" I mean "you", someone with experience with this type of thing) calculated and made these predictions? At a certain latitude range, if you look at a certain direction (above the Sun), around a certain time, you will see flares. As time passes, the direction changes by about 15° per hour (or so I'm guessing). Maybe we could even predict the specific satellites, how high above the horizon they would be visible, but I don't even think that's necessary.

I figure we could try to predict these, have an observer* test our predictions, and refine them if necessary and later publish some predictions for anyone to verify them.

Also, my brother-in-law is a flight controller at an airport in Belo Horizonte, I'm pretty sure it's the Confins airport, from which one of the flights that reported seeing these lights took off (flight AD 4657 does the CNF-POA path on Saturdays, arriving close to 11:45 PM). I'm not sure if he would be able to get a pilot to cooperate, but I think it would be in his interest to get to the bottom of this, so may be worth a shot(?). I already sent Mick's videos to him.

* - - I know a few people living in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost State in Brazil where these sightings have been happening, who might be willing to help; I know even more people living in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina: that's where I am from and most of my family and friends live there, but it's at a lower latitude of 27.6°S, so I'm not sure if it will ever become visible from the ground there.

What do y'all think?
 
I figure we could try to predict these, have an observer* test our predictions, and refine them if necessary and later publish some predictions for anyone to verify them.
Theoretically possible, but in practice probably a lot of work. It's clear that simply being in the right region of the sky isn't enough, and it's not clear what the full set of criteria for a flare is (as well as the angles and position, there's also different types of satellite with different light attenuation measures). Showing that a particular flare was from Starlink (as I do in the videos) is straightforward. Predicting specific flares is likely to be an inexact science, at least for some time.

But it's a pretty safe bet that if there are flares in a region of the sky on one night, then there will be flares in an overlapping region the next night, and the next several nights. We see this with the Porto Alegre webcam.

The most common argument they use, time and time again, is that pilots are trained to recognize satellite flares and they wouldn't make this mistake. Which is, well, just fallacious, but if I point out that pilots make mistakes all the time, they act as if I'm offending the intelligence of the pilots.
Been there :)

I think a useful thing here would be to get the pilots to actually admit that this is what they saw. I don't hold out much hope for that, as people get embarrassed by making such mistakes (even if totally understandable) and prefer simply not to discuss it. Some will also point at other moving lights they remember seeing which could not be Starlink (or, for some reason, caught on video)
 
Twitter user @Tosconildo has sent me the following translation of the Brazilian/Portugese video I posted above...


This is a translation and transcription of:
Video: RESOLVIDO O MISTÉRIO DOS OVNIS NOS CÉUS DO BRASIL!!!
English: SOLVED! The mystery of the UFOs in the skies of Brazil!!!
By: SpaceToday Link:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZa4PfXwhNw

I had never translated something before, and translating this took way too many hours, in specific translating this person was more annoying than it needed to be. And yes, I know that I did not need to translate the whole video, I just wanted to. I also made a summary, which also explains the study from the video that he links, which I am unwilling to translate as that would take way too much time with my lack of experience, and doesn't really seem needed, hopefully my summary helps though.

Table Of Contents:
1. Summary:
2. Portuguese (PT-BR):
3. English:
4. Both/Script:

1. Summary:
It appears that the person in the video only used the frames from Mick West's videos as a background, he never once addressed it and he never mentions Mick West by name or his video, although what he does mention at 06:47 that it wasn't only Gabriel Zaparolli(the author of the video he linked) that did work to figure out what the lights are, and that a "gringo"(slang for foreigner, usually american, usually visiting foreigner) that "did the same thing".

Gabriel, the person who's work he's talking about, is a member of the BRAMON(Brazilian Meteor Observation Network) as well as a storm chaser and amateur astronomer, and along with other people from BRAMON, based on images that Gabriel recorded from a beach in Torres, did a study using astrometry that correlated the lights Gabriel recorded with satellites, and even one that wasn't Starlink(GP-B at 35:13). The link shared is a short explanation of his findings, which has some of the recordings he took and an explanation of what is happening, along with that map of green and purple satellites, green being satellites that are illuminated by the sun and purple being ones that aren't, at the time of his recording.

There IS a longer video(a VOD of a stream), on a different channel "Olhar Digital", in this link where Gabriel, Marcelo Zurita, technical director of BRAMON and Carlos Fernando Jung regional director of BRAMON for the south region of Brazil (other titles in the description).


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPGXw5mJyBM
, ,

In this video the three of them explain their findings as well as how they got there, starting from the appearance of the lights, to filming them, to initially discarding satellite flares due verifying that a reflection off of Starlink solar panels under these circumstances happening in the direction of Rio Grande do Sul is impossible, to correlating to satellites ayways (34:08) and eventually figuring out that it is possible for the light to be reflected off of the bottom of the satellites (model 55:45). At 54:34 they demonstrate what the visibility of the satellites are like around the year, to explain the sun being able to shine on the satellites to the south of the earth and to explain why it only started happening at the start of November.

At 57:06 Marcelo simulates with a laser pointer and a globe that the reflection is possible.

At 58:49 they briefly show an American study they found which, models the magnitude of the reflection off of satellites across the year.

Other things they mention: They are unable to figure out what the sightings were for events that they didn't witness, obviously, in specific there was pilot reports early on, and only early on, that claimed they were witnessing lights, orbiting each other, or in spiral, -> they mention that none of the lights they recorded in the 2 nights of footage that they recorded ever had any sort of curve to their movement, and that besides providing a possible explanation that the "orbit" thing could have simply been an illusion of various satellites passing the same area of the sky that would cause a flare, one after the other, they could not prove what it was.

For the spiral one, Jung's observatory actually captured a image of a cloud being illuminated by a blue glow, that's not included in this video, at about the same time one of the pilots reported lights in one of the first few days, in the same direction, I was unable to find the original recording, if it was ever public, most news simply put a screenshot of it, the most I got was this gif:

https://s2.glbimg.com/pPnpAmPr8Q_2v.../vKm4N1QpmundjQIAH7Bw/ezgif.com-gif-maker.gif



For that one the theory Jung shared was what the image above the gif shows, reflected light... to me it doesn't look like that light is even moving, just the clouds... but that's probably not the whole footage. There was also a claim of a light "following" the plane from one of the states above to Porto Alegre, but turns out people are interpreting "saw these lights since" as following, at any rate no footage of, that, so can't prove, but yes these satellites are still visible from that far away, is what they say.

2. Portugese Transcript
(not included by @flarkey)

3. English Transcript with @flarkey's bold emphasis
00:00 - Hello hello astronomy friends all over the world!
00:04 - My name is Sérgio Sacani,
00:06 - I'm [an] editor of the blog Space Today,
00:09 - and you're watching another Space Today TV.
00:15 - In today's show:
00:17 - It was solved ["right?"/exclamation], the UFOs in Brazil were solved,
00:22 - so you there[watching] don't need to go out desperately shooting at flying saucers,
00:28 - you don't need to flee to the mountains
00:32 - and nothing like that, because the explanation is pretty much what I had already said
00:36 - for you here in the video[previous?], but now we have data - that's right,
00:39 - measurements were made and everything, so the mystery of the UFOs in Brazil was solved.
00:46 - Let's understand it all, start the vignette. (the intro screen)
<snip advertising>
01:48 - interesting and relevant, that happens in our universe.
01:55 - Very well, de- it has been one week, right? One week more or less,
01:59 - that Brazil is in shock. Why is Brazil in shock?
02:03 - Because, basically there in Rio Grande do Sul, started there sightings of certain lights,
02:10 - sightings made by the people in [the] airport, sightings made by aircraft pilots,
02:17 - sightings made by people, that is, people went there and pointed the camera at the sky
02:23 - and saw lights moving in the sky there, primarily in the region of Porto Algre, region of Torres
02:31 - it's the region there in the south of Brazil.
02:34 - And then, right?, already the crazy theories started [soon soon], that the Earth was being invaded, that there was a portal
02:42 - and that the spaceships leave, that they will dominate the world and everything. [I don't know where he heard people saying this lol]
02:46 - Just so you all are aware, ok?- by the way it was a student of mine that told me this, Fabiano Fetter, yeah- there was already people,
02:52 - look how crazy, selling an official report of the UFOs of Rio Grande do Sul, and that's why -
02:59 - you have to take a lot of care with these things, alright people?
03:02 - Yeah- lights in the sky is something very common and like I talked about in that video there- I'm going to leave it linked here [he didn't?]
03:09 - currently the low atmosph- the low orbit of the Earth, right? how we say it, it is full of satellites
03:17 - something that in the past wasn't, so for you to have an idea there existed there in the eighties
03:23 - end of [the] eighties and the nineties, a very famous satellite that were the satellites of the Iridium network
03:30 - Iridium was [for?] the people who used satellite telephony.
03:34 - The Iridium satellites they were big, they had a high surf- a big reflective surface
03:41 - and these satellites when [they] glowed, the people called it "Iridium Flare", it became very famous, moreover
03:49 - maybe one of the things most confused with Unidentified Flying Objects were the Iridium Flares.
03:57 - Afterwards the people knew, why? Because there exists catalogs and you knowing the location where you are you know
04:03 - if there will be an Iridium Flare in your region, in fact there were people who took advantage of this to point at a moment
04:09 - that an Iridium Flare was going to happen and say: Are you seeing there? I knew there were going to show up.
04:14 - So we have to take a lot of care with this. Very well,
04:18 - the lights showed up and such, right? I made the video here, discarded that the- there's this thing of drone, in this case it wasn't
04:25 - we always say it's drones, right? And such, and I said, right, that the low orbit of the Earth that it is filled with satellite
04:32 - primarily Starlink, alright? And then this Starlink thing it causes such a confusion because the people when we say
04:40 - "ah, I saw a Starlink satellite", the person normally things that it's that little train, right? That is one satellite after the other.
04:48 - That there is only seen soon after it's launched. But and afterwards do the Starlinks keep being observed? They do,
04:55 - they do yes, in certain conditions you do have this observation of this satellite, and not only Starlink-
05:01 - various other satellites can be observed, so much that, remember what I said about the Iridium Flare? Today exists the Starlink Flare
05:09 - it's something very famous in the whole world, alright? So these lights there that appeared in the skies of Porto Alegre
05:16 - they were already seen in other places in the world in the same way with the same behaviour.
05:21 - And the cool thing is that for example nobody can talk about maneuver, nobody could talk about supersonic speed, nothing like that,
05:31 - the light appea- simply appeared and afterwards it disappeared, if you took a long-exposure picture, you would see a
05:38 - trail identical to the trail that is a satellite in the sky.
05:43 - And then, the coolest thing is the following, that today, right?, we have a lot of people who know[slang] astronomy
05:49 - spread out around all of Brazil and the whole world, so I will leave here the credits to the great Gabriel Zaparolli
05:55 - I'm going to leave the link for his video, alright?, I spoke with him today, asked to use his information
06:01 - but go there and subscribe to his channel and watch his video because his video is complete
06:06 - What did Gabrie- Gabriel do? He went to Torres during various nights there, and he filmed all the lights, look how cool right?
06:15 - Nothing like doing the experiment, right? So instead of you staying there swearing and saying it's spaceships, he went there
06:23 - and did the experiment, he went there and- and went with a bunch of others, wasn't just him, that there is important,
06:29 - took images with various cameras, in various different ways and all, did photometry studies that are calle-
06:36 - various studies there he- astrometry that is what we call it and all
06:40 - spoke with the people of BRAMON, understood?, spoke with the people of BRAMON and he went after the data
06:43 - [CAPTION] Green dots: visible satellites
06:43 - [CAPTION] Purple dots: satellites ocluded by the Earth's shadow
06:43 - [CAPTION] Sky of Torres/RS - 23:30 of the 9th of November | direction south of the sightings.
06:47 - and with the data he could prove for us, not only him as well, there was a gringo [foreigner, usually American] that did the same thing
06:56 - because today you can do this, today it's easy you have software that can list the satellites that are passing in your position there
07:05 - in a specific day, in a specific hour, you have th- the programs with the sky, right?, so you are able to
07:13 - assemble the sky that you saw there, you are able to simulate it, and you can see [it].
07:18 - So, with all of that, they proved that that what- those lights weren't aliens,
07:25 - weren't spaceships, weren't anything like that, [it] was simply the Flare, the shine of a satellite, the shine of a satellite,
07:33 - because the sun hits the reflective part of the satellite and that causes a shine, and then the satellite shines and afterwards it stops
07:42 - I said in that video "ah, but the pilo-?", the pilot is not obliga- obligated to know about all this
07:49 - but I even left an alert there, I believe that from now on the companies should start teaching and show to the
07:56 - pilots, that yes, the low orbit of the Earth is filled- I'm even going to leave a little snippet of the video that-
08:02 - Gabriel's, just so you can have an idea of the amount of satellites that are in the sky at that moment
08:11 - in the- where he did his experiment a- above the horizon, in the "ribbon"[of the sky] where the lights appeared
08:17 - so you will see the amount of satellites [that] there are, today the low orbit of the Earth is like this
08:23 - and these lights, again, don't appear only there, [they] appear in the whole world,
08:28 - and in the whole world these analyzes are made, and through those analyzes we prove and confirm
08:35 - that it's nothing about alien spaceships, it's nothing about [a] being from another planet
08:40 - we aren't being invaded, it's not any galactic fleet, nothing like that,
08:44 - simply it's a Flare that hits, right?, the sunlight that hits a satellite, reflects and afterwards it disappears
08:52 - normally, why? Because you have the shadow of the Earth so when the satellite disappears out of the blue
08:58 - it's because it entered the shadow of the Earth, and it's all solved [this is not even true lol, Gabriel/BRAMON's study didn't claim this]
09:02 - so, Fabiano, right?, this student of mine said that the guy there with the report was selling the report
09:06 - [CAPTION] Solar panels / reflective antennas [? honestly he doesn't even talk about the background, really]
09:08 - and there must be people who must have bought it, the report about the UFOs in the sky of Brazil that doesn't have anything
09:14 - that's why, "ah, the official night of the UFOs", ah, ah, ah, mainly official night of the UFOs
09:23 - "ah but the pilot saw a light in the sky", he [did] see a light in the sky, nobody ever said ? lying, the problem is what is the light
09:30 - he doesn't know, he doesn't need to know, the pilot, alright?, military pilot, right?, the pilot of the the Air Force [?it was only airlines?]
09:38 - the pilot of the the commercial planes, he isn't trained in it,
09:44 - and the atmosphere is filled with phenomena and the low orbit of the Earth is filled with objects that present this behaviour
09:54 - so there it is, for us to be able to finish this case. Case closed. Mystery solved.
10:01 - We know what the UFOs in the sky of Brasil are,
10:04 - nothing besides the shine of the sun on satellites, this is proven and confirmed, and, you know what is coolest about this?
10:13 - You there that will be swearing me out in the comments, you just need to go there and do the same experiment that Gabriel did,
10:20 - he took cameras- he took people with him, he took everything, they did, [they] filmed in every way
10:26 - again, I'm going to leave his video here, you go there, watch his video because everything is explained
10:30 - how he did the experiment, the people filming along with him,
10:34 - and afterwards all the analysis that he did taking into account everything there.
10:37 - So it's all explained, mystery solved, there's no more- don't be afraid, I became aware
10:42 - that there were people afraid, I became aware that there were people trying to fire upon the objects,
10:48 - I became aware of such absurd things around during this week, that
10:52 - have to have- that's why [we?] have to - we have to be here spreading this knowledge, ok?
10:57 - The sky has many things that happen there in the sky, and I can say, tranquil, that these things all have an explanation.
11:05 - Just have to go after [it], do the experiment that it will be confirmed, I spoke even, with Gabriel
11:10 - that I want to do a- a live[stream] with him to be able to speak[slang] about this there, about the experiment that he did
11:17 - that will be cool as shit[slang], ok[slang]? [caramba is from the spanish 'ay caramba', it has no literal meaning in portuguese]
11:19 - People, so that's it, alright?, the mystery is solved, the UFOs of Brazil are nothing more than
11:25 - Flare on satellites, this was the video I wanted to leave here in the channel for you now,
11:31 - I hope you have enjoyed it, if you did you know: that slap on the thumb, that full speed drop-kick to the chest of the like [wow]
11:37 - that helps a lot[slang] the video and the channel to gain relevance, never forget the youtubistic bundle:
11:44 - share, favourite, subscribe to the channel if you aren't already subscribed, leave there in the comments what you
11:51 - want to know, we are together every day/all the time
11:54 - in the fight against the bad scientific divulgation in Brazil and against the anaemia in the astronomy of our country.
12:02 - Once again, my name is Sérgio Sacani, I'm [an] editor of the blog Space Today and you've just watched another
12:10 - Space Today TV. Bye[sorta, it literally means "went"]!
 
Last edited:
Wow o_O -- The webcam that started this flap now has a live synchronised feed with a Stellarium overlay. It even has linked timecodes to Starlink Flare observations.


Gravação dia 05 e 06 de Janeiro de 2023 Noite - Céu de Porto Alegre - RS - com Stellarium​

1,353 views Streamed live 11 hours ago
00: 26: 44 (2:09:36)
00 :36 :20 (2:19:14) - STARLINK-2599
00: 36 :47 (2:19:38) - STARLINK-1449
00: 49: 11 (2:32:04)


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23USciyoP3o
 
Last edited:
Wow o_O -- The webcam that started this flap now has a live synchronised feed with a Stellarium overlay. It even has linked timecodes to Starlink Flare observations.

The overlay doesn't seem to be perfectly matched to the camera view above, but it's still a very good thing!
 
Impressive! Looks like they are manually aligning with two stars at the start. They identify two starlink flares, linked in their comments, but at those points the alignment seems off.
 
Starlink Satellite Flares are now being seen in Uruguay and being reported as OVNIs / UFOs. This is on Facebook..

Screenshot_20230221_125854_Facebook.jpg

Screenshot_20230221_125834_Facebook.jpg

Video 1 -


Update, these were filmed around 01.45 AM from near Monte Video, roughly -34.93 S -55.50 W

Sun is in the expected position, around 40 degrees below the horizon.

1676994114002.png
 
Last edited:
Similar UFOs/OVNIs seen in MonteVideo on 13 Feb 2023.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj-gPg9xR1w


The Uruguayan air force issued a statement informing that in the face of calls from many neighbors referring to the "sighting of lights" in the town of Almirón, they set out to initiate an investigation.
The strange lights in the Uruguayan sky were seen by thousands of people at dawn on Saturday at the Almirón Hot Springs Festival.
As seen in the videos shared by witnesses, they were red lights that turned on and off, flying over high altitude and distance.
➡️ Read the full note at cronica.com.ar
 
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