Some highly unusual groups of aerial lights appeared over Santiago, Chile, in December, and while the exact date of the incident isn't known, a video caught the objects moving around in very interesting patterns.
After looking at the two-part video, it's easy to wonder why only one person captured the event and from only one vantage point.
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According to the Daily Mail, an unidentified woman videotaped the lights from her window while she and others are heard excitedly talking about what they're seeing in the sky.
The first two minutes show four long strips of hovering multiple lights (seen above). Then, one by one, the strips move slowly away from each other. As they do this, you can see smaller, flashing lights on each of them -- they look almost like aircraft on a landing trajectory to an airport.
Here's the complete video:
The second half of the video shows up to seven individual lights or orbs that enter the scene from right in a straight line and appear to come around in a long circle, heading back to the right and out of the picture. The following image is from that formation.
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Online comments and explanations for these alleged UFOs included drones, planes, cars coming down a background hill, Chinese lanterns, window reflections and the ever-popular digital editing.
"I found that, for the first part of the video where you see the several sets of four lights traveling in a line, also has within it blinking strobes in typical aircraft strobe patterns. Perhaps it was part of a viral stunt over Santiago," said image and video analyst Marc Dantonio.
"My bet is that it's a light array hanging from ordinary aircraft or from drones. Confirmation of sightings from other locations could tell us if it's more likely aircraft or drone," Dantonio told HuffPost in an email. He's an expert in computer-generated imagery and has been commissioned to create special working models for such clients as the U.S. Joint Chiefs in Washington, Congress, the U.S. Navy and the Smithsonian Institution.
Dantonio noticed that the strip lights in the Chile video tended to sag under their own weight, "slanting slightly downward in the opposite direction of overall travel. I felt that, watching this, I was seeing a situation much like the aircraft that tow those big banners. In those cases, the banner sags and is lower than the altitude of the aircraft. All you need is wind resistance and forward motion."
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The video expert also suggests that, where the lights appear to hover, they're more likely heading directly away from you or toward you -- always in some sort of forward motion.
And what about the second part of the video with the individual lights?
"As they make their curved path, you see the light brighten up a lot," Dantonio observes. "This will happen if someone attaches a light fixture to a drone or an aircraft and turns directly toward the camera and points more or less directly at it. So it could be an LED fixture with lights. I also see strobing lights on these, as well, which are common on drones."
"For now," he concludes, "it appears to be a human-made hoax."
Reporting on the UFO Sightings Daily website, Scott Waring takes all of this up a notch.
"This UFO event is not unknown to Santiago, but is actually a yearly thing, when fleets of UFOs leave the underground base in the mountains along Santiago. It is a yearly event for aliens."
So...what exactly does that mean? ETs pick this time of year to fly south for the winter?
What do you think?
UFOs? Maybe They're Just...
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