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Last month, on the night of Dec. 7, multiple pilots saw lights in the sky over the Willamette Valley.
As several outlets reported, an audio recording of air traffic control that went viral features alarm over the lights’ strange movements among pilots of two commercial airliners, United Flight 1596 and Horizon Air Flight 2207, the latter of which had a pilot who reported having seen the same phenomenon “a few times over the last month in the same area” near Eugene.
Whatever they were seeing, it wasn’t showing up on air traffic control’s radar. It was, however, appearing on the crash avoidance system of a small Life Flight plane, Medevac 1LF, heading toward North Bend. Its pilot, Joe Buley, gave the most detailed description:
“There’s one way up high and one about at my altitude. Moving in…like a corkscrew pattern. Moving at…extreme speeds... It’s a red circular shape and it keeps zipping out towards the ocean and then coming back in, about 20 miles or closer to us and then zips back out of the ocean.”
The response from air traffic control: “You are cleared to maneuver as necessary—a left or right to avoid the UFO out there.”
This incident was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the first time anybody’s reported seeing something like this over the Pacific Northwest. This isn’t even the first time that a United Airlines flight has reported seeing something like this over the Pacific Northwest. The region has been an epicenter of postwar UFO sightings, with more people having reported sightings in Portland and Seattle than in any other metro area in the United States since 2000. (The U.S. government now designates such sightings as “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs.)
It was here that on June 24, 1947, an amateur pilot named Kenneth Arnold set off a national frenzy after he reported seeing “nine saucerlike aircraft flying in formation” above Southwest Washington while flying from Chehalis to Yakima. (Thus, like “grunge” and “vegan strip club,” “flying saucer” became a product of the Pacific Northwest.) Ten days later, the crew of United Flight 105 reported a nearly identical experience while flying from Boise to Pendleton.
In 1950, an Oregon couple named Paul and Evelyn Trent took two pictures on their Kodak of a “disc-shaped object” that supposedly hovered above their farm outside of McMinnville without emitting any sound. The pictures ended up in Life magazine and remain a point of contention between UFO skeptics and believers.
In the 75 years since, there’ve been thousands of reported sightings across the Pacific Northwest. Regardless of personal opinions of such things, it’s undeniable that during this time UFOs and little green men have embedded themselves into the cultural fabric of the region, another stitch alongside New Age crystal healers, Bigfoot true believers, and whatever it is that draws people to a full-size replica of Stonehenge on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. McMinnville and Chehalis both now hold annual UFO festivals; the Royal Canadian Mint issues a coin commemorating a 1970 sighting in British Columbia.
What happened last month over the valley, though, was different from anything else that’s come before. The Dec. 7 incident represented legitimate documentation of multiple professional pilots seeing the same things and having the same reaction to them. In that audio recording, an unnamed pilot aboard Horizon Air Flight 2207 can be heard refuting what’s become the standard explanation for what they saw—satellites. “No, it’s not Starlink, I promise,” he says. “I know what that looks like.” Buley, the pilot of Medevac 1LF, also doubts this explanation. “I’ve seen satellites…stuff like that. This was definitely different,” he told KEZI-TV. (WW reached out to Life Flight Network but was told that Buley and the rest of his crew have declined to speak further on the matter.)
It’s all very strange. Perhaps the UFO believers are right after all. If they are, and this is a real thing, then the greatest story of all time has been playing out above our backyard. Or maybe it’s nothing at all.