An investigation is underway after pilots from two different airliners reported seeing UFOs over the Irish coast earlier this month. According to The Independent, the incident began when a British Airways pilot saw bright lights flying past her aircraft. Soon after, a pilot from a Virgin Airways plane saw a similar object. The Virgin pilot said it looked like a meteor with multiple bright flashes of light emanating from it. One of the pilots reported it flying very quickly, perhaps twice the speed of sound. Air traffic controllers reported nothing on their radars.
“It was moving so fast,” the British Airways pilot said. “It came up on our left-hand side and then rapidly veered to the north. It was a very bright light that disappeared at very high speed.”
The Irish Aviation Authority is looking into the incident. “This report will be investigated under the normal confidential occurrence investigation process,” the IAA said in a statement, according to The Independent.
There is certainly a bit of skepticism about whether it was actually aliens. “It was most likely what are commonly called shooting stars,” said Apostolos Christou, an astronomer from Northern Ireland’s Armagh Observatory and Planetarium, the BBC reported.
“It also appears there were bits coming off the object and flying past the aeroplane, that is also what you would expect if it was a particularly large rock from space hitting the atmosphere, it would tend to fragment,” Christou also detailed. He said November is a busy month for shooting stars.
