A time-lapse video recorded over the Outer Banks has ignited a new round of debate over the possibility of UFOs frequenting North Carolina’s barrier islands.
Photographer Wes Snyder posted the 2-minute video on YouTube Feb. 18, noting it was created from a three-hour time lapse of the Milky Way — as seen from Frisco’s famous flying-saucer shaped “Futuro” home.
However, Snyder got more than he bargained after compiling the photos into a video.
“I seemed to have captured some strange unidentified red trails,” he posted on YouTube. “Can you tell me what these are? … These appeared for about 30 minutes during my 3-hour time lapse.”
Snyder told McClatchy News on Monday that he has yet to get a sound explanation or even a good guess. The video was created entirely from photos taken Sept 23, which took him months to compile into a video, he said.
“I think it’s someone illegally flying a drone at night, but it’s anyone’s guess,” Snyder, who is a licensed drone pilot, said in a Facebook post. “It wasn’t a plane, it moved in way too (of a) chaotic pattern to be a plane.”
The video, which has gotten thousands of views, was recently featured on the syndicated TV show “Just This Minute,” which said the mysterious lights “seem to fit the real definition of unidentified flying objects.”
“See those little squiggly lines running through his time lapse?” the show’s host Nick Calderone asked. “Planes don’t fly like that.”
There have been multiple reports of tough to identify objects flying over the Outer Banks, including an October incident in which a man recorded a fleet of lights over the Pamlico Sound. Some speculated it was the U.S. military conducting exercises.
A year earlier, in November 2018, a fisherman recorded two sets of hovering lights off Cape Lookout National Seashore and posted it on YouTube. National Park Service officials told McClatchy News they were not sure what the lights might be, but found them to be “peculiar.”
Commenters on Snyder’s video had high praise, calling it everything from “creepy” to “wickedly cool.” Few have offered guesses on the “red trails,” however.
“Maybe people were out star gazing together … and were using a laser pointer to identify stars they were identifying or talking about? Carol Brunk asked.
“Years ago, I swore I saw a UFO in Frisco. My wife blames the hot tub and alcohol!” J. Austin Egger wrote.
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