The Pilot's High-Altitude Lights

The pilot told the FBI that starting in October 2023 "a lot of pilots have been seeing the same event" in the hours between midnight and 3 AM. His own first sighting came that month on a flight from Boston to Dublin. At 37,000 feet he saw white lights to the north-east towards Gander and believed they were at 50,000 feet or higher. Each started dim, grew brighter and faded out over ten seconds to a minute. He did not think they were Starlink, Starlink flares, satellites or meteors.

He says he has seen them about ten times since, for up to two hours at a stretch. Some held still. Others moved in straight lines and changed direction.

In February 2024 he filmed them on his phone from the cockpit with its lights off, looking north towards North Dakota. The record says the video shows sometimes ten or more white lights at once, moving in straight lines and brightening and dimming. He never felt unsafe and put them more than 100 miles away.

What is on the record

There is one document: an FBI FD-302 interview record from March 2024, FBI-UAP-D024, released in the Department of War's PURSUE release of 7 August 2026. His name is redacted. The record never calls him an airline pilot and names no employer. It gives the routes, the cruising height and a speed of about Mach 0.80. The same interview covers a 2002 sighting at Bagram that has its own page.

The video is described but not released, and the record gives two positions for it: about 150 miles north-west of Minneapolis, and at the 5:22 mark a flight panel showing 40 to 50 miles north-east of Sioux Falls. The two points lie about 280 km apart, too far to cover in minutes. His claim that many pilots saw the same thing is not documented in public.

An ordinary candidate exists. Phys.org reports a 2024 study by Mallama and Cole documenting pilots who mistook bright Starlink flares for unknown lights, and a flare could fit a dim-bright-fade cycle. Nobody has tested it against his sightings. He rules it out himself, and it does not obviously cover lights that change direction.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0, a single account: one man in one interview. He is redacted, so the record carries no identified witness. A tier measures sourcing, never truth. What he filmed is not resolved here.