Pilots report ultra-fast UFOs over Ireland, prompting an investigation

Airline pilots cruising through the Irish sky were startled to discover they had some unexpected company early Friday morning, the Irish Mirror reported.

Pilots from three different airlines all radioed Shannon Air Traffic Control in Ireland to report the strange sighting as they flew through the air, according to the paper.

The first call, at about 6:47 a.m., came from a British Airways pilot on the way to London from Montreal, the Irish Times reported.

“It was moving so fast. It appeared on our left hand side and rapidly veered to the north. We saw a bright light and it then just disappeared at a very high speed,” the pilot said, according to the paper.

The controller responded that he saw nothing on the radar and that there were no military exercises at the time, according to a recording of the conversation posted by the aviation enthusiast site AirLive.

Another pilot, this one from a Virgin Airlines flight, chimed in that he had seen it as well. That pilot said he had seen “multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory,” with two of them extremely bright, according to the BBC. The pilot suggested they were meteors entering the atmosphere and burning up.

One pilot said the objects were moving at “astronomical” speed, of at least “Mach 2,” or twice the speed of sound, according to the BBC.

A third pilot from Norwegian Air said he was “glad it wasn’t just me,” the Irish Mirror reported.

“Very interesting that one,” a pilot says in the recording. The controller said the reports would be passed along and looked at.

“This report will be investigated under the normal confidential occurrence investigation process,” a spokesperson for the Irish Aviation Authority said, according to the Irish Times.

But David Moore, the chairman of Astronomy Ireland, said he was 99 percent sure the lights were simply shooting stars, or “fireballs,” the Irish Independent reported.

The fireballs are caused when space debris enters the atmosphere and burns up as it falls, producing a bright, streaking light.

“They are completely random, they happen in broad daylight, they happen in the dead of night,” he said, according to the paper— though he joked that the aliens “could be very clever, and what it could be is the aliens, to disguise their presence, fire a meteor into the atmosphere.”

This story was originally published November 13, 2018 at 8:19 AM.