UAPs seen by pilots - shared by Ryan Graves

flarkey

Senior Member.
Staff member
Ryan Graves, ex-US Navy fighter pilot and advocate for the recognition of UAPs as a flight safety issue, tweeted the following with the claim that the video and pictures recorded by an airline pilot show anomalous phenomena. They look just like the other lights seen by pilots that turned out to be flaring Starlink Satellites. Lets investigate!



Source: https://twitter.com/uncertainvector/status/1692587122543165463?t=-0fEAxr2KhWaHGbn6A_wBg&s=19


External Quote:

[] = edited info for privacy

"I am a [Major US Carrier] A320/321 Captain, the following sighting occurred during one of my flights recently. Since I have shared my story, several other [Major US Carrier] pilots have reached out to me and shared their similar experiences, including sharing their video recordings of these objects from the Flight Levels. All seen at the base of the big dipper.

[Last week of July], 2023, I departed Santo Domingo DR at 2305 destined for New York JFK. My route of flight was L453 in NY Oceanic airspace, non radar hundreds of miles offshore. At approximately 1 hour into the flight as we were approaching the southern boundary of the NY oceanic airspace, and at 32,000 feet, I called out a visual on traffic that was excessively bright and looked like about 80 miles range... and then disappeared visually. I never saw the traffic on TCAS. Then a few minutes later I saw two objects round in shape, one lighted and one not flying in a formation just above the horizon, at a range I guessed of 120-200 NM. The object/s would illuminate to be as bright as a star for several seconds, then go dark for a few minutes, only to illuminate again. The brightness would vary from bright to very bright to dark. The color of the lighted object was white light. There was a second object you can clearly see in the photos that would follow the illuminated object, but it would not illuminate itself. Except for the 3:10-3:30 second point of my video I think you can see the second object illuminate. This went on for the remaining 2-2.5 hours of my flight to NY on L453 in Oceanic airspace. After reviewing the photos, I think the objects might have been a bit further away, but distance is very difficult to gauge at night.

I have the brand new Samsung S23 phone which has the best camera on the market for a cell phone and I started recording this object in video. I have a great 7 min video of it appearing and disappearing while I was talking to other airliners on 123.45 vhf about it. You can hear that conversation in the video! Another airliner approximately 400 NM ahead of us at 36,000 feet stated they saw the same thing.

I also took about 30 photos of these objects in "night mode" on the phone and they came out really good... in one of them you can actually see the lighted object and the unlit object very clearly as round metallic objects. All of the photos were taken with some sort of long exposure setting to be able to get as much light as possible to the sensor... You will be able to see in the long exposure photos the stars are pins of light but the UFO's are streaks of light because they are moving! It is actually amazing! All of this happened over about a 2.5 hour flight and continued for the entirety of our flight. The light seemed to be on or just above the horizon until we got closer to our destination of NY. Just prior to beginning our descent the objects appeared much higher in the sky 80-90 degrees above the horizon and much further away, actually out of the atmosphere."
[Mick: Attached Files]
 

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[twitter] You will be able to see in the long exposure photos the stars are pins of light but the UFO's are streaks of light because they are moving! [/twitter]


I dont see this in any of those pics. which ones show that?
 
Although, one hour into the flight, they were at 34,000 feet. Not 32,000, but that could be misremembered.

Location is approx 25.708134, -70.212310
 
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the objects appeared much higher in the sky 80-90 degrees above the horizon
that has got to be wrong, can you really see straight up in an aiirliner's cockpit? these craft have no canopy!

I was thinking maybe a reflection, but if both pilots saw it in the same place in the sky (e.g. relative to the big dipper), that's impossible.

It looks like there was indeed a light in the sky.
 

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that has got to be wrong, can you really see straight up in an aiirliner's cockpit?
People are very bad at estimating angles (I've seen a good discussion of this recently, but I'm very bad at remembering where I've seen things!) He probably meant something more like 60 degrees, or even less. Must have forgotten that 90 degrees would literally be straight up.
 
Why don't the pilots tell each other of the Starlink visuals? It must be known by now, or don't pilots read the internet?
 
Why don't the pilots tell each other of the Starlink visuals? It must be known by now, or don't pilots read the internet?
They do, we have many clips of inter-plane chatter on 123.45Mhz talking to each other. Plus there is a thread on pprune.org all about the 'lights over the Atlantic.

Maybe once this is investigated Ryan Graves could have Mick on his podcast to explain the Starlink Flare Phenomenon to pilots and the world.
 
They do, we have many clips of inter-plane chatter on 123.45Mhz talking to each other. Plus there is a thread on pprune.org all about the 'lights over the Atlantic.

Maybe once this is investigated Ryan Graves could have Mick on his podcast to explain the Starlink Flare Phenomenon to pilots and the world.
The question is, why aren't Graves's and ASA's advisory board full of "scientists committed to investigating this mystery" able to resolve this before Graves goes public with it? It just makes them look incompetent by now.
 
The question is, why aren't Graves's and ASA's advisory board full of "scientists committed to investigating this mystery" able to resolve this before Graves goes public with it? It just makes them look incompetent by now.
The real question is - why aren't they prepared to say that there are prosaic things in the sky that confuse pilots? They seem to want to mystify every sighting, turn it into 'genuine anomalous phenomena'. I think this one might be a turning point. Ryan has set this one up ready for the big exposé, and Mick has pre-debunked it as Starlink. What will Ryan do when Mick makes a video of this and demnstrates that it actually was Starlink? Hopefully Ryan will eat his hat. Maybe nothing will change.
 
The FlightRadar24 playback looses tracking of JBU1910 on 23 July in the area of the sighting, but at an estimate it seems to be around 4am UTC time...

1692392784462.png


And here's in-the-sky.org for that time and coordinates show that there were Starlink satellies in that exact region of the sky, moving left to right as seen in the video.

1692393010490.png


Edit: corrected date in screenshot.
 
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In the video, we see they are 163NM from BOREX, with an ETA of 04:43

2023-08-18_13-55-22.jpg


That puts them a bit further north, at 26.198286, -70.321106, and if it's JBU1910, puts it at 04:10 UTC, July 24th

2023-08-18_14-05-35.jpg
 
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At approximately 1 hour into the flight as we were approaching the southern boundary of the NY oceanic airspace, and at 32,000 feet, I called out a visual on traffic that was excessively bright and looked like about 80 miles range... and then disappeared visually. I never saw the traffic on TCAS. Then a few minutes later I saw two objects round in shape, one lighted and one not flying in a formation just above the horizon, at a range I guessed of 120-200 NM.

Interestingly, a few minutes before the video, they had a close encounter with another JBU flight that was 1,000 feet below them.
2023-08-18_14-12-55.jpg


Maybe unrelated, but would have been a cool head-on (prefectly safe, 1,000 feet vertically) at night.
 
@Mick West are you doing this already? I mean I can give it a go but I am slower that you as I have to remember how to get custom TLEs to work in Stellarium
I think this is not really worthwhile in this case yet. without an exact time we won't be able to synchronise the video with Stellarium. There aren't really enough reference points in the video to sync it manually. But hey, if anyone wants to give it a go the TLE data is there.
 
@Mick West are you doing this already? I mean I can give it a go but I am slower that you as I have to remember how to get custom TLEs to work in Stellarium
I did it with the current TLEs, which. given we don't have an exact time, are probably close enough. I'll stick these in...
 

Source: https://twitter.com/uncertainvector/status/1692586130162475209?t=pwmOoIEXK0RfCYROc9rmPQ&s=19


Source: https://twitter.com/uncertainvector/status/1692587122543165463?t=-0fEAxr2KhWaHGbn6A_wBg&s=19


External Quote:

[] = edited info for privacy

"I am a [Major US Carrier] A320/321 Captain, the following sighting occurred during one of my flights recently. Since I have shared my story, several other [Major US Carrier] pilots have reached out to me and shared their similar experiences, including sharing their video recordings of these objects from the Flight Levels. All seen at the base of the big dipper.

[Last week of July], 2023, I departed Santo Domingo DR at 2305 destined for New York JFK. My route of flight was L453 in NY Oceanic airspace, non radar hundreds of miles offshore. At approximately 1 hour into the flight as we were approaching the southern boundary of the NY oceanic airspace, and at 32,000 feet, I called out a visual on traffic that was excessively bright and looked like about 80 miles range... and then disappeared visually. I never saw the traffic on TCAS. Then a few minutes later I saw two objects round in shape, one lighted and one not flying in a formation just above the horizon, at a range I guessed of 120-200 NM. The object/s would illuminate to be as bright as a star for several seconds, then go dark for a few minutes, only to illuminate again. The brightness would vary from bright to very bright to dark. The color of the lighted object was white light. There was a second object you can clearly see in the photos that would follow the illuminated object, but it would not illuminate itself. Except for the 3:10-3:30 second point of my video I think you can see the second object illuminate. This went on for the remaining 2-2.5 hours of my flight to NY on L453 in Oceanic airspace. After reviewing the photos, I think the objects might have been a bit further away, but distance is very difficult to gauge at night.

I have the brand new Samsung S23 phone which has the best camera on the market for a cell phone and I started recording this object in video. I have a great 7 min video of it appearing and disappearing while I was talking to other airliners on 123.45 vhf about it. You can hear that conversation in the video! Another airliner approximately 400 NM ahead of us at 36,000 feet stated they saw the same thing.

I also took about 30 photos of these objects in "night mode" on the phone and they came out really good... in one of them you can actually see the lighted object and the unlit object very clearly as round metallic objects. All of the photos were taken with some sort of long exposure setting to be able to get as much light as possible to the sensor... You will be able to see in the long exposure photos the stars are pins of light but the UFO's are streaks of light because they are moving! It is actually amazing! All of this happened over about a 2.5 hour flight and continued for the entirety of our flight. The light seemed to be on or just above the horizon until we got closer to our destination of NY. Just prior to beginning our descent the objects appeared much higher in the sky 80-90 degrees above the horizon and much further away, actually out of the atmosphere."
[Mick: Attached Files]

"We have 6 billion smartphones in the world," he said. "And at any given moment, there's a million people airborne with a window looking out into the atmosphere. And everybody has a high-resolution camera, video and stills. And all we have is a fuzzy Tic Tac and some other fuzzy images." - Neil DeGrasse Tyson
SOURCE: https://www.newsnationnow.com/space...n-on-historic-ufo-hearing-i-need-better-data/

Here is some smartphone footage...it's a dot, utterly useless information.

The witness statement below is consistent with a satellite flare.

The object/s would illuminate to be as bright as a star for several seconds, then go dark for a few minutes, only to illuminate again. The brightness would vary from bright to very bright to dark. The color of the lighted object was white light.
 
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The real question is - why aren't they prepared to say that there are prosaic things in the sky that confuse pilots? They seem to want to mystify every sighting, turn it into 'genuine anomalous phenomena'. I think this one might be a turning point. Ryan has set this one up ready for the big exposé, and Mick has pre-debunked it as Starlink. What will Ryan do when Mick makes a video of this and demnstrates that it actually was Starlink? Hopefully Ryan will eat his hat. Maybe nothing will change.
I'm confused by this too Flarkey. I wrote Graves an email a while a go explaining this new phenomenon occurring from all these Starlink satellites being launched. Explaining from an amateur astronomers position and someone who's witnessed a UFO, how pilots are not accustomed to seeing these multiple flares and advising him to read these threads on Metabunk. I didn't get a response. Recently he posted something along the lines of "Starlinks are the new weather balloons", which to me suggests he's chosen to ignore the skills and experience of amateur astronomers. Do you think he's refusing to accept this explanation because it's coming from Mick West and Metabunk? I don't know who's feuding with whom on Twitter.
 
I'm confused by this too Flarkey. I wrote Graves an email a while a go explaining this new phenomenon occurring from all these Starlink satellites being launched. Explaining from an amateur astronomers position and someone who's witnessed a UFO, how pilots are not accustomed to seeing these multiple flares and advising him to read these threads on Metabunk. I didn't get a response. Recently he posted something along the lines of "Starlinks are the new weather balloons", which to me suggests he's chosen to ignore the skills and experience of amateur astronomers. Do you think he's refusing to accept this explanation because it's coming from Mick West and Metabunk? I don't know who's feuding with whom on Twitter.
Now I know that most people will not automatically react on a PM from an unknown person, but that he is ignoring your explanation says enough. He probably is holding on to his True Believer membership..
 
Now I know that most people will not automatically react on a PM from an unknown person, but that he is ignoring your explanation says enough. He probably is holding on to his True Believer membership..
He's still squarely on Team "It's Rotating!" over the gimbal video too, which is all you need to know about his actual desire to get to the bottom of things.
 
Now I know that most people will not automatically react on a PM from an unknown person, but that he is ignoring your explanation says enough. He probably is holding on to his True Believer membership..
I think you are correct with you last sentence. Some of the replies criticizing the flares idea are exhausting to read. As if it's more ridiculous than crafts dog fighting in the upper atmosphere.
 
Do you think he's refusing to accept this explanation because it's coming from Mick West and Metabunk? I don't know who's feuding with whom on Twitter.
For anyone, admitting you are wrong and changing your mind is difficult. This goes for UFO fans and skeptics alike. But I still can't quite fathom why they refuse to acknowledge any positive & evidence supported identification of these UAP/lights. Their position reminds me of politicians, or religious leaders, who see everything as a battle between their side (party/sect/group) and the other side (opposition party/evil/group). The other side can do no right - and that seems to be what Ryan and the #ufotwitter & /r/UFOs crowd are doing to Mick and @metabunk.
 
That's why Graves's ASA has an advisory board with some scientists on it.
Article:
If UAP continue to defy conventional explanation — we must invest in scientific research.

To write this in good conscience, they can't just ignore conventional explanations.

Exacty. And the thing is - if 'safe aerospace' is his goal, then informing pilots of prosaic phenomena that pose no physical risk to but do cause a cockpit distraction is just as worthy an endeavor as discovering anomalous phenomena that do pose a risk. I want my airline pilots to be busy flying the plane, not busy videoing flaring satellites with their iPhones thinking they are ailen craft.
 
if 'safe aerospace' is his goal
It's not. ASA is a political lobby ("Take action. Congress needs to hear from you.") intent on strong-arming goverment into "transparency" (repeated ad nauseam on their page), thereby feeding into UFO conspiracy theories.
Article:
What are UAP? Advanced UAP?
UAP stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or objects in our airspace that cannot be identified. Advanced UAP represent objects demonstrating sophisticated technology. The government has reported hundreds of cases of UAP, including significant incidents of advanced UAP without explanation.

Their premise is that UAP represent "sophisticated technology", which gives them a threat to leverage Congress with.

I mean, StarLink is sophisticated technology, but it's not suitable to harrass the government with or to put Graves and Fravor in the spotlight.

Congress needs to realize that there's a man behind the curtain who exaggerates a scenario for his own benefit.
 
It's not. ASA is a political lobby ("Take action. Congress needs to hear from you.") intent on strong-arming goverment into "transparency" (repeated ad nauseam on their page), thereby feeding into UFO conspiracy theories.
Article:
What are UAP? Advanced UAP?
UAP stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or objects in our airspace that cannot be identified. Advanced UAP represent objects demonstrating sophisticated technology. The government has reported hundreds of cases of UAP, including significant incidents of advanced UAP without explanation.

Interesting they seem to be distinguishing between "UAP" and "Advanced UAP". I've not seen that before. AUAP is the new UFO?
 
Interesting they seem to be distinguishing between "UAP" and "Advanced UAP". I've not seen that before. AUAP is the new UFO?
Apparently.
The new bill (see https://www.metabunk.org/threads/uap-disclosure-act-of-2023-proposed-u-s-legislation.13058/ ) distinguishes between "temporarily unattributed objects" and redefines UAP:
External Quote:
The term ``unidentified anomalous phenomena'' means any object operating or judged capable of operating in outer-space, the atmosphere, ocean surfaces, or undersea lacking prosaic attribution due to performance characteristics and properties not previously known to be achievable based upon commonly accepted physical principles.
So these are the "advanced" kind.

External Quote:
The term ``unidentified anomalous phenomena'' includes what were previously described as
(i) flying discs;​
(ii) flying saucers; [..]​
(iv) unidentified flying objects (UFOs); [...]​
 
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