Pilots report UFO 'moving at extreme speeds' while flying over Oregon

At least four pilots witnessed UFOs, some 'moving at extreme speeds' over Oregon this past weekend.

A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokesperson told DailyMail.com that at least one of the aviators 'reported seeing unidentified lights while flying in Seattle Air Route Traffic Control (ATC) airspace' during an alarming December 7th episode. 

While the administration would not confirm the presence of any FAA radar data that could corroborate the sighting, FAA ATC audio reveals the pilots in a state of shock.

An ambulance pilot stated he saw a bright light, 'red in color,' barreling towards his plane at 'extreme' speeds, before suddenly reversing course back toward the Pacific.

'I don't even know how to describe how fast it was moving,' the air ambulance pilot, with Life Flight's Air Medical Transport service, can be heard saying on the tape.

Later on Sunday night, December 8th, a United Airlines pilot reported an unexpected squadron of strange lights above the Eugene, Oregon-area, according to local news, which has long been a UFO hot spot along with the surrounding Pacific Northwest.

'We're seeing three or four targets. They're all altitudes. Up and down,' the United pilot told Seattle ARTCC (ZSE). 'It's pretty crazy.'

Two more pilots with Horizon Airlines pilots also told ZSE controllers that they too were seeing inexplicable and brightly lit UFOs in the night sky that Sunday, according to at least one air traffic controller who spoke to local NBC affiliate KGW 8 News.

But it was Life Flight's ambulance pilot who reported the most bizarre of these UFO or UAP encounters, telling ZSE air traffic controllers that one of these lights was circling in a 'corkscrew pattern.'

The Life Flight pilot also said that the lights popped up on his aircraft's collision avoidance system, likely discounting theories of misidentified glints or flares of SpaceX Starlink satellites or more distant celestial phenomena.

'You are cleared to maneuver as necessary — a left or right — to avoid the UFO out there,' an air traffic controller told the ambulance pilot.

At its nearest, this red glowing UFO got to within 'about 20 miles or closer' of the medical plane, according to the pilot.

'It keeps zipping out towards the ocean and then coming back,' he told air traffic control, 'then it zips back to the ocean.'

'It's weird. It’s [a] red, circular shape.'

In its statement to DailyMail.com, the FAA said that it shares only well-documented UFO/UAP cases reported to the air traffic controllers with the Pentagon. 

'If supporting information such as radar data corroborates the report, the FAA shares it with the UAP Task Force,' an FAA spokesperson said via email.

But the federal aviation safety agency did not respond to requests for clarification, generating confusion over the fact that the Pentagon officially disbanded the UAP Task Force on November 23, 2021. 

FAA did, however, make note of the Pentagon's current UAP investigations office: 'The Department of Defense All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office serves as the centralized clearing house for UAP reporting impacting national security or safety.'

'Multiple US government agencies have individual programs or processes to study and document UAP. However, the agencies also work collaboratively,' FAA said.

Some dedicated UFO researchers, including University of Utah mechanical engineer Dr Douglas Buettner, lean towards the idea that the lights (or some of them) were most likely misidentified Starlink internet satellites, launched into orbit by SpaceX. 

'I've had two other people look at it, and they say it is consistent with Starlink,' Dr Buettner told KGW 8 News. 'Literally all it is — it's the sun hits the satellite just right, and it is being reflected back into your eye.'

Dr Buettner told DailyMail.com that he has only '60 to 80 percent confidence' in this hypothesis right now. 

'I'd like to get the radar from the airport,' he noted via, email. 'And we can try and pull the flights' [...] ADS-B info.'

Short for Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast, ADS–B hardware collects and records an aircraft's positioning source, the craft's avionics data (communications, navigation, and other flight computer information) and more for later use. 

Since May of this year, Dr Buettner has also been a board member of the nonprofit Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), which is dedicated to investigating airborne mysteries just like this.

Oregon has enjoyed the interest and attention of UFO hunters as the home of UFO Fest, held in the small town of McMinnville in Yamhill County. Each May, the town's McMenamins Hotel in Oregon stages its celebration of the extra-terrestrial.

The infamous McMinnville UFO photos have remained two of the most famous and thoroughly studied 'flying saucer' images in modern history, since they premiered in LIFE magazine in June 1950.

Taken by Oregon farmer Paul Trent, the McMinnville photos have been scrutinized by a 'Carl Sagan Medal'-winning planetary scientist, William Hartmann; US Navy optical physicist, Bruce Maccabee; and a former satellite imagery analyst for the European Space Agency, François Louange, but the classic 'flying saucer' photos have never been conclusively explained.

'This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses,' Hartmann wrote in his review for the US Air Force-funded Condon Report.

In 1975, Bruce Maccabee, the US Navy optical physicist, managed to track down Trent's original photo negatives in an effort to determine if the unidentified object might be a scale model hanging by a string.

'Nobody's found the thread,' Maccabee told the DailyMail.com, 'but if the Trents were fortunate and happened to pick a thread that wasn't solid black but was white or greyish colored you couldn't have seen it anyway.'