UFO Encounter / Commercial Airline Pilot - Colorado Area

[Mick West]

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrYhjrMmm74

In the commercial airline Captain's own words... "The whole event started about Midnight EST in the Colorado area. We were heading west on about an 85* heading at 35,000 ft going 078 Mach around 540 mph. The entire event started just to the right of the Big Dipper with a falling star traveling multiple thousands of miles/hr and immediately after, the craft appeared. First one was a larger one, then a smaller one that came from the left to meet up, then the original moved back to the left where they finally stopped moving for over an hr. The large craft stayed in one spot as the other 2 moved around. The final video shows them in a triangle which lasted about 20mins. We were given a new heading to the left and lost site for the remainder of the night on 10/19/22." "I have been a professional pilot for 42 yrs with over 28000 hrs. I need to stay anonymous." "This has Never happened to me."

Content from External Source

That's a bit confusing, as an 85° heading is EAST, not west, and 35,000 feet in that areas is all eastward traffic. So probably going east. But then if they lost sight moving to the left then that implies they were going west!

The video looks like two stars and something else. Unfortunately there seem to be no identifiable constellations.

Second video (first three not uploaded)
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LTQ76kSeng


Another telling:

Article:

“The whole event started about midnight eastern time in the Colorado area. We were heading west at 35,000 feet going around 540 miles per hour.

“I then saw this falling star, which didn’t go across the sky but came vertically straight down just to the right of the big dipper at an unbelievably high speed.

“Immediately afterwards, the craft appeared. I saw this one glowing craft moving up and down repeatedly. Then my co-pilot said, “holy shit there’s two of them”. There was one bright one and another which was dimmer, and as the hour went on, they started getting brighter.”

Source: https://www.liberationtimes.com/home/exclusive-footage-ive-never-seen-anything-like-this-in-my-life-veteran-airline-captain-films-multiple-ufos-over-colorado-which-merge-into-mysterious-triangle-formation

 

[flarkey]

“The whole event started about midnight eastern time in the Colorado area. We were heading west at 35,000 feet going around 540 miles per hour.

We were given a new heading to the left and lost site for the remainder of the night on 10/19/22.

Urgh, I hate it when they use midnight as the time reference. Does that mean midnight between the 18/19 October, or midnight between19/20 October....?

Anyway - 00:00hrs EST is 0400hrs UTC on 19 Oct.

“The whole event started about midnight eastern time in the Colorado area. We were heading west at 35,000 feet going around 540 miles per hour.

We were heading west on about an 85* heading at 35,000 ft going 078 Mach around 540 mph.

an 85° heading is EAST, not west, and 35,000 feet in that areas is all eastward traffic. So probably going east. But then if they lost sight moving to the left then that implies they were going west!

If he was logging time in Eastern Time, it suggests that he took off from the Eastern side of the USA and was Heading West. Maybe the "85°" is a typo and he meant 285°. Or it could have just been a mistake. And yes, I agree that if they lost sight moving to the left then that implies they were going west!

There's not a lot of solid data to go on here.

 

[Ann K]

In the second video you posted it looks as if the large object is separating more distinctly into two lights. But it seems that color appears in them, if watched closely, and the light on the left is consistently showing green while the one on the right is more red.

 

[Mick West]

This, Video 5, is stabilized on the bottom left light, and 20x speed. You see the spacing smoothly increase, consistent with getting closer. The greenish yellow light resolves into two, and it looks like the bottom left one is also resolving into two.

The captain reportedly said:

Article:

These didn’t move for 500 miles. They didn’t get bigger or smaller. They were so high and appeared not to be in our atmosphere.

Source: https://www.liberationtimes.com/home/exclusive-footage-ive-never-seen-anything-like-this-in-my-life-veteran-airline-captain-films-multiple-ufos-over-colorado-which-merge-into-mysterious-triangle-formation

That's a bit odd as they clearly did at least get closer and brighter.

 

[FatPhil]

That's a bit odd as they clearly did at least get closer and brighter.

When sped up, it's clear, certainly. Human eyes aren't that sensitive to small steady changes. If he's staring out into the dark, he might be expecting (subconsciously) dark adaptation to kick in, and the things he's looking at to just naturally get brighter as eye sensitivity increases? If he's looking down at brighter controls, he might lose any reference level for comparison of prior brightness - every time he looks back up it's "dim"?

Do we know if he ever resolved the two front lights in the same way that the video does? If it was far and dim enough that he never resolved them, then we are close to the limits of human vision, and errors in perception are more likely.

Actually - was he "seeing" through the camera+screen, or through just his eyes? If the former, then some things become more understandable, and others become less.

 

[flarkey]

When sped up, it's clear, certainly.

Do we know if he ever resolved the two front lights in the same way that the video does? If it was far and dim enough that he never resolved them, then we are close to the limits of human vision, and errors in perception are more likely.

If they're getting bigger, and the aircraft is on a westerly heading, is it fair to assume that the objects in the video are ahead of the aircraft and therefore in the Western sky (or perhaps on the ground)?

Edit: after thinking about this .... if they're visibly getting ~50% bigger over a period of 1m29 in VIDEO 5 - does that suggest that they are not stars or distant satellites? They must be closer to have such an effect on their relative perspective.

Travelling at 540mph (= 9 miles per minute) for 1min29 equates to 13.5 miles travelled.

 

[Mick West]

Edit: after thinking about this .... if they're visibly getting ~50% bigger over a period of 1m29 in VIDEO 5 - does that suggest that they are not stars or distant satellites? They must be closer to have such an effect on their relative perspective.

50% bigger means the distance has reduced by 33% (say, from 150 miles to 100 miles)

Plane travelling at 540 mph = 13.5 miles in 1.5 minutes.

Which would put them 13.5*3 = 40 miles away at the start, and 27 miles away at the end.

If that's correct they would get to them in three more minutes.

 

[Ann K]

If that's correct they would get to them in three more minutes.

I'm ignorant of the procedures in airline flight directives, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but are approaching aircraft the reason they would have been directed to a different heading at that time?

 

[flarkey]

I'm ignorant of the procedures in airline flight directives, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but are approaching aircraft the reason they would have been directed to a different heading at that time?

Probaby not. The aircraft was proably just making a normal heading adjustment as it neared it's destination.

 

[Mendel]

I'm ignorant of the procedures in airline flight directives, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but are approaching aircraft the reason they would have been directed to a different heading at that time?

They should have been at different altitudes, which tends to prevent mid-air collisions (vertical separation).

50% bigger means the distance has reduced by 33% (say, from 150 miles to 100 miles)

Plane travelling at 540 mph = 13.5 miles in 1.5 minutes.

Which would put them 13.5*3 = 40 miles away at the start, and 27 miles away at the end.

If that's correct they would get to them in three more minutes.

That's only true if the target is stationary, isn't it?

If it's an oncoming aircraft, the closing speed would be higher, making the distance bigger.

 

[Mick West]

If it's an oncoming aircraft, the closing speed would be higher, making the distance bigger.

Yes, if it's oncoming aircraft at a similar speed, then you could quite simply double the distances above, so it's going from 80 miles away to 54 miles away.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

I agree that the perceived motion - all three lights spreading smoothly apart - is consistent with the aircraft moving toward fixed lights. I think these lights in the video are ground lights.

On that night, the Big Dipper was very low on the horizon at midnight Eastern/10:00 Mountain. If the true heading were 288, the Big Dipper, would have been to the right of the witness. Bright stars in the Dipper that were just above the horizon would be Mizar at about Az 347 degrees, Megrez at about 356 degrees, and Dubhe at about 6 degrees. So the plane was not heading toward the Dipper but to the left.


The Taurids were active in the northeast sky to the "right" of Ursa Major, The Taurids are known for frequent bolides, which probably explains the meteor. Meteors surprise people, because they can appear to travel straight up or straight down. This is because of perspective of course. The observer misperceives the actual 3D motion as a 2D motion.

Not much to go on but I speculate this scenario:

The witness saw a bright meteor head toward the ground which caught his attention and raised his alertness level. Many historical solved UFO cases have started with a bright meteor, including the Portage County UFO Chase (which appears in a fictionalized version in Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Witnesses get excited by the bolide, start scanning the skies and then see something else.

Because he perceived the meteor heading toward (and hitting?) the ground, our witness in this case shifted his attention to the ground and saw bright ground lights.

So how is this consistent with the reported duration of one hour? I doubt that the pilot of an airliner was staring at these lights for a solid hour. And what we actually see in this short video is not consistent with his story of unmoving lights over the period of an hour. What we see are lights moving apart as if the plane is heading toward them, and getting closer at a rate that's not consistent with the story.

What I suspect is that he would be doing his job for some time, then look out again at different lights, assuming they were the same lights.

"These didn’t move for 500 miles. They didn’t get bigger or smaller. They were so high and appeared not to be in our atmosphere."

One more detail to resolve. How is this consistent with ground lights? Witnesses often use frustratingly ambiguous words to describe what they saw. Witnesses don't tell you what they saw. They tell you what they think was going on.

It's always good practice to ask what the apparent size of the object was, not how big the thing really was. A UFO described by a witness as being "as big as house" sounds very impressive because you might picture a house size object hovering right over the witness. But if you ask, "If it were as big as a house, how far away would it have been'?, you might get an answer like "It looked like a house up on (a local) mountain." And it turns out to have been Venus. (Venus is considerably bigger than a house, now isn't it? It's just really far away. The missing factor is how far away the witness thinks it was.)

So it's best practice to ask the witness what the apparent size of the object was and how many degrees above the horizon the objects was. Words like "high up in the sky" often turn out to be descriptions of objects that were near to the horizon but were perceived by the witness to be very far away and thus at high altitude. Maybe out in space.