MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — Mysterious lights in the night sky above Middletown have some residents puzzled.
Around 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, multiple people said they witnessed strange rotating green lights above them.
Bryce Garrick was in his car when he saw the lights. They appear to be moving in a clockwise fashion while hovering before quickly jetting across the sky then disappearing.
Another person sent us a photo of the lights. WCPO later learned that person was trying to create a video to prank people about aliens.
The Butler County Sheriff's Office said it did not receive any calls about the lights. Dispatchers said they do not have an explanation for the sightings.
Bryan Simpson, president of the Cincinnati Astronomical Society said how quickly the lights sped off was way too fast to be a drone. He doesn't have an answer for what people saw either. But he did say it is easy to fake these types of videos.
"I think the real test of authenticity is if you get a lot of reports of the same thing. Otherwise it's probably fake. And by lots I want to see at least 20 different reports," Simpson said. "This is so easy to fake with off the shelf motion graphics software for TikTok likes."
Simpson said he plans on looking into the origin of these sightings and will update our newsroom when he learns more.
These sightings come less than a month after a NASA panel held a public meeting to examine hundreds of reports of unidentified flying objects and give feedback on which could not be explained.
The panel detailed some of the main characteristics given in the hundreds of reports that people used to detail what they saw in the UFO sightings.
Those characteristics often included that the objects were usually small or round in shape and size, and they often appeared silver or translucent or white.
Reports said they usually appeared to be flying at about 10,000 to 30,000 feet above the ground, and others noticed that the objects appeared to fly past at Mach 2 speed, while others appeared to be stationary.
Reports said the objects appeared to have no exhaust as a sign of how the object's propulsion functioned.
While NASA admitted that the agency wasn't at a point where they could conclusively say these objects were not coming from outer space, experts said there was not complete certainty on what some of them were, or their origins.
In 2021 the Pentagon said of 144 sightings made by military pilots since 2004, all but one was still unexplained.
Commercial pilots are also hesitant to report sightings, NASA believes. NASA said it is trying to remove any stigma around reporting UFO sightings so that people don't feel they are being seen in a negative light by reporting them. The agency said some scientists have faced online harassment for their efforts to investigate UFO sightings.
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