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Experts reach verdict on bizarre UFO videos over California desert
Panicked locals in two cities north of Los Angeles, California, piled onto Amazon's Ring neighbors app to report UFOs that 'zig zagged' and hovered over the weekend.
Their reports of a 'bright light' that looked like 'a shooting star' but acted more like a 'hovercraft' sparked shockwaves across social media — alongside the emergence of eerie cell phone videos that purported to capture some of these six alleged craft.
But a wide community of experts, including UFO researchers with Harvard's Galileo Project, told DailyMail.com that the videos were most likely 'an intentional hoax.'
The videos appeared to show drone swarms used in an LED light show thousands of miles away from California, based on landmarks and other visual cues, they said.
And some of these UFO videos were paired with old and unrelated audio tracks passed off as the videos' own.
Above, a clip from one of two videos purporting to be from the August 16, 2024 UFO sightings reported in California's Palmdale-Lancaster area, in the high desert north of LA
Electrical engineer John Tedesco, who runs a lab affiliated with Harvard's Galileo Project, told DailyMail.com: 'The first two videos seem a bit suspicious to me.
'The patterns of longitudinal lights are well-organized. This could be drone swarms.'
However, he admitted: 'The quality of the video doesn’t give us much to work with.'
Further assessments, by Tedesco and others, only added to those suspicions, suggesting the videos weren't related to the initial UFO reports north of LA at all.
The social media frenzy first started online the morning of Saturday, August 17, apparently spurred by reports posted to Amazon's Ring neighbors app Friday night.
'I was intrigued by the first neighbor who posted that he saw a UFO from his yard,' wrote one resident of the Palmdale-Lancaster area, in the high desert north of LA.
'So, my mom and I went out to ours to see if we'd see anything,' the user continued.
'They were too far [for] me to confidently say they were flying saucers, but [...] we counted six after being out there for 10 minutes.'
All told, at least five witnesses spotted one or all of the reportedly half dozen UFOs.
Records from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) related to mysterious and potentially hostile drone incursions over a top secret Pentagon airfield nearby, as well as public NASA data, may offer the best hope of explaining these Ring reports.
But the videos that were posted claiming to capture the same airborne enigmas are another story, one DailyMail.com's experts could answer more concretely.
In this video, a woman can be heard saying 'Oh, my God. It's landing!' as she appears to film the red-and-blue light UFO gliding slowly toward a marina dock below. Experts told DailyMail.com that the footage was likely taken from Hawaii - not California
Above, one of three user-generated posts to the Amazon Ring neighbors app about the UFOs
Soon piggy-backing off these text-only Amazon Ring app accounts, short UFO videos emerged of a blinking string of red and blue lights hovering allegedly over these same desert neighborhoods.
One 23-second video opens on a quiet, suburban street at night and then zooms in on the 'UFO' pulsing above the neighborhood.
A male voice exclaims in palpable fear off-camera: 'Oh, what is that? Mom! Mom, you see this?' A woman's voice can next be heard replying: 'Holy s***! What the hell is that?' The video then ends abruptly.
In a second clip, a woman can be heard saying 'Oh, my God. It's landing!' as she appears to film similar red-and-blue lights off of a UFO as the craft glides slowly toward a marina dock.
Ted Roe — who co-founded the nonprofit National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) with NASA psychologist Dr Richard Haines — told DailyMail.com that the videos appeared to be forged.
'Nearly as I can tell, the Palmdale footage is an intentional hoax using footage from a drone show in Hawaii,' Roe advised, 'and an audio track used in several other vids.'
A year earlier, in fact, the same audio between a concerned boy and his mother was posted to Reddit paired with footage of a large, wet sea slug writhing in a still pool.
One 23-second video allegedly from Palmdale last weekend (screencaptures above) uses audio from unrelated video that is, at least, over a year old
Above, one of three user-generated posts to the Amazon Ring neighbors app about the UFOs
Above, one of three user-generated posts to the Amazon Ring neighbors app about the UFOs
Roe, whose work with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) has helped improve how the FAA accepts UFO reports from civilian pilots, noted that his analysis was only provisional.
But a deeper analysis by Tedesco, the electrical engineer, and his avionics specialist brother who also works with Harvard's Galileo Project confirmed Roe's assessment.
'I took one of the video frames from the [23-second] video as a still image,' as Tedesco explained to DailyMail.com.
'There seem to be multiples of the object in a rectangular pattern, possibly nine drones,' Tedesco added. 'However, due to the quality of the video, I'm not certain.'
Tedesco's brother, aerospace avionics specialist Gerald Tedesco, who collaborates with him on their UFO field laboratory, agreed the drone explanation was most likely.
The behavior of these UFO lights also matched patterns pre-programmed into commercial drone swarms — according to Preston Ward, who serves as chief pilot and general counsel for the Texas-based drone light show company Sky Elements.
'To me it looks like the 6 drone test pattern,' Ward told DailyMail.com, 'distributed when someone first purchases drone show software.'
'The landing sequence is, for sure, drones using standard parameters,' the seasoned drone pilot opined.
Ward's colleague, Kyle Pivnick, added that one of the videos' visible landmarks did not match the alleged location of the sighting: 'Palmdale and Lancaster both are very land-locked and the video looks like it is at a marina.'
The footage appeared to have originated near the 2024 Pokémon World Championships in Honolulu, Hawaii — which capped off three nights of the international event with drone light shows according to local ABC affiliate KITV.
Footage uploaded to social media by the Hilton Hawaiian appears to show a similar marina adjacent to the coastal launch point for these Pokémon Worlds drone light shows — drones creating matching those red and blue LED light formations.
Above, an image of the Pokemon Worlds drone show posted by the Hilton Hawaiian last week
Above, another image of the 2024 Pokémon World Championships drone light show in Honolulu, Hawaii - captured by a local surf shop
Above, another image of the 2024 Pokémon World Championships drone light show in Honolulu, Hawaii - this one depicting Pikachu, a popular 'electric' type pokémon - captured on video by a local surf shop
Compounding the likelihood that these videos were simple online disinformation, the UFOs depicted do not resemble the written accounts of the UFOs posted by residents of the Palmdale-Lancaster area to the Ring neighbors app.
Another of these witnesses, who 'saw a bright light up in the sky' while walking their dog, described their sighting as one solid object.
'At first I was like omg what a cool plane that [US defense contractor] Northrop assembled, but to my dismay it was a hovercraft,' the Ring user wrote. 'I saw [a] UFO.'
Another self-reported witness said they saw a UFO that looked at first like 'a shooting star falling east,' while out in their backyard with their daughter. But the single bright object, not a collection of lights, 'stopped very abruptly and zig zagged going north.'
'Checking to see if anyone else saw it,' they continued, 'or are we both going crazy.'
The Tedesco brothers told DailyMail.com that the UFO field research that they conduct with their Nightcrawler team employs a suite of sensors that resolve whether or not a UFO sighting is actually a drone.
Their Galileo-partnered mobile lab has 'a sensitive acoustic microphone with a parabolic dish' to pull noise data off odd distant lights or apparent objects in the sky.
'If the objects were prosaic, we would get a specific sound and frequency profile for quadcopter propellers,' Gerald, the avionics expert told DailyMail.com, referencing a common, commercial drone model.
'The same could be said about the rotor blades of a helicopter, prop-driven planes or turbofan jet engines.'
'Additionally, doing a radar sweep of the sky would allow us to get a cross-sectional profile of the craft, gather distance, elevation, speed and possibly relative size and shape of the object,' Gerald added.
Despite the Tedesco brothers' high doubts about the videos that have claimed to be from the Palmdale-Lancaster sightings last weekend, the pair have not written off this 'UFO flap' entirely.
'I'm not saying it can't be something else, other than man-made drones,' Gerald Tedesco added. 'But with the limitations in parametric data to support other possibilities [...] the likelihood of drones becomes the simplest explanation.'
Above, NASA's experimentaal x-59 supersonic jet tested out of Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks, a classified facility run by the Pentagon contractor near Palmdale, California
Above, a recent notice from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) banning drones in the Palmdale area, near its airport, due to incursion on top secret military airspace
The suspect videos aside, the unexplained citizen UFO reports out of the high desert north of LA might have to do with a recent spate of rumored drone incursions on the US Air Force's top secret aerospace testing facility Plant 42 in the area.
The Palmdale Regional Airport shares its runways with Plant 42, which is home to Lockheed Martin Skunkworks' advanced projects division.
The FAA has recently issued warnings and a ban on drone flights nearby, due to a series of incursions on this airspace that may have been flights by ordinary US citizens or espionage.
'We have observed multiple UAS [uncrewed aerial systems] activities over Plant 42 during the last few months,' Edwards Air Force Base spokesperson Mary Kozaitis told defense news site The War Zone on Monday.
'The number of UASs fluctuated and they ranged in size and configuration,' according to Kozaitis. 'FAA was made aware of the incursions and Edwards continues to monitor the air space to ensure the safety of base personnel, facilities, and assets.'
'As a reminder to drone enthusiasts,' the Air Force official added, ;overflight of Plant 42 is strictly prohibited and may result in criminal prosecution, fines, and loss of operator privileges.'
Reporters for The War Zone also noted that no local police reports appear to have been filed to confirm the UFO sightings reported on the Ring neighbors app.
Above, A skywatchers page run by the US space agency, and designed to help civilians spot the International Space Station (ISS) as it passes overhead, showed the station would be above Palmdale, California during the time of these UFO sightings
Above, a photograph of NASA's International Space Station (ISS) in orbit
But some of the sightings purporting to catch a glimpse of UFOs during last weekend's 'flap' are likely to have had an even more conventional explanation.
Glimmers of sunlight reflecting off NASA's International Space Station (ISS) were expected to be visible on the ground for minutes at a time in the early morning all across the past weekend and beyond.
A skywatchers page run by the US space agency, and designed to help civilians spot the ISS as it passes overhead, reported that sightings would feasible above Palmdale from Wednesday August 14, 2024 through Thursday August 29, 2024.
This page, NASA's 'Spot the Station' website, noted that visibility of the ISS from the ground around Palmdale-Lancaster was set to be one of its longest early on Saturday morning — shining in the sky for six minutes beginning at 5:35am local time.