Is the video of a UFO fleet flying over Earth real? Or was it faked?

A UFO sighting video appeared on Reddit this month. The Redditor, posting from Spartanburg South Carolina on September 4 described seeing “flashing lights” above his house as he & his family stood in the backyard. While it was overcast outside, the lights were prominent & bright, too bright to be passing airplanes. 

The Redditor’s UFO sighting video was picked up by The Express and by UFO expert Scott Waring, who hosts the blog UFO Sightings Daily. Waring noted the UFO sighting from South Carolina, determining it was a fleet of UFOs and that they were flashing their lights to communicate with people on Earth. 

The UFOs in the video

Honestly, the Reddit video appears to be captured by cell phone and the twinkling lights from the alleged UFO fleet can’t be seen until halfway through the video, as the camera zooms closer & closer to the clouds. Initially, we were underwhelmed until the lights blinked & twinkled brightly from dark cloud cover. 

While it looks cool, is it a UFO sighting, or is there another explanation for twinkling lights peeking out of cloud cover in the middle of the day? 

Scott Waring’s explanation

Scott Waring, who describes himself as a writer, teacher & UFOlogist on UFO Sightings Daily, concluded that this UFO sighting wasn’t just one spaceship. There were many. Waring explains that the flashing lights continued for several minutes near the cloud. 

The reason? “They sometimes communicate with flashes and if you actually hit one with a laser (which I have) they will flash back within 3 seconds,” Waring states on UFO Sightings Daily. Apparently, Waring is giving his audience a way to communicate with flashing orbs if they see any. 

Waring also believes there were about 50-70 UFOs in the video. However, it still begs the question of whether the flashing lights were UFOs or something else. Waring remains convinced they’re UFOs, declaring the footage “a fantastic catch, because we see the location well, the scope of the sky well and the flashing.”

TTV_Spake and what other Redditors are saying

TTV_Spake was the Redditor who captured the footage. From his upload caption, he also believes it was a UFO sighting. From the comments on his video, he’s not alone. 

Fellow Redditors posted links to the same phenomena uploaded to YouTube, including a massive fleet of alleged UFOs moving through the sky in Mexico in 2004. The captain says the footage was taken in Guadalajara just after the Mexican military claimed to have picked up a UFO on their infrared sensors. 

Another link from Moscow in August 2020 shows similar, slow-moving lights parading across the sky. A link to another UFO sighting posted to Reddit showed apparent UFOs gliding across the sky in Louisiana. 

TTV_Spake also elaborated in the comments that the video he posted didn’t do what he saw justice. “We could very clearly see 20+ sources of light at a constant glow far beyond the clouds. They would flash (what you can see in the video) and then return to their normal glow, which would remain constant (what you cannot always see in the video).” 

Another explanation? 

A Redditor floated the idea that the lights could have been reflections from Earth. It’s not unheard of for flashing lights in the sky to be mistaken for UFOs when really, they’re flares from cameras or city lights reflecting from the sky. 

Science has an explanation for reflecting light that occurs naturally with clouds. According to the World Meteorological Association, the UFO sighting could’ve been a photometeor. The WMA defines a photometeor as “an optical phenomenon produced by the reflection, refraction, diffraction or interference of light from the Sun or the Moon.” 

A rainbow is the most well-known photometeor. However, they can also be scintillators, or flashing lights in the sky caused by natural phenomena like stars, or from reflecting light from earth. Interestingly, the WMA’s video of a scintillator doesn’t look like the flashing lights described by TTV_Spake, but it looks like a spinning disk that’s been flagged as a UFO sighting in the past. 

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Do you think the video uploaded to Reddit is a UFO sighting, or do you think there’s another explanation? Let us know what you think in the comments!