EUGENE, Ore. – A Life Flight pilot is speaking out about a strange phenomenon he and his crew observed on the evening of Dec. 7 after spotting at least one UFO over western Oregon multiple times.

Joe Buley has been flying since 2013 and now has over 6,000 recorded flight hours, but he said he has never seen anything like it.

“I still don’t even know what it was, so I don’t know. It’s definitely unusual. I don’t know,” Buley said.

It was a routine flight for his team based in Aurora, Oregon. On Saturday evening, they received a call to arrange medical transport to North Bend.

“We were assigned to go to North Bend-Coos Bay. And like any normal transport, we check the weather and NOTAMs. And then we head to our destination and leave Aurora and climb over 7,000 feet, was transferred to Seattle Center and heard another plane seeing strange things that they weren’t sure what it was and that has Kind of surprised me because you don’t normally hear things like that,” Buley said.

Buley asked air traffic controllers about the reports. Then they asked a United Airlines flight, which also reported seeing strange lights in the sky.

“And they said it and then answered me, ‘Medavac 661 Lema Fox, did you copy that?’ And I said, “Yeah, I heard it.” My medical crew in the back said, “Yeah, that’s kind of unusual.” And we didn’t really think much about it and continued our transport, getting close to the Corvallis- area and saw the strange lights. As you could see in the recording, the audio recording is essentially what we saw. Buley said.

This audio recording went viral, was clipped from a radio traffic website and posted on YouTube. Buley confirmed that his voice is the “N661LF” in this now-viral video. The video also shows air traffic controllers communicating with a United Airlines flight from Denver to Eugene, which also reported seeing strange objects in the sky.

Buley said he saw at least three clearly strange events during his flight to North Bend.

“Just an orange-red ball that moved. They were quite far away, probably at least 20 miles from us. One that moved from a higher altitude, turned down a little and then moved further north. That’s when I looked at my MFD, which is our main PFD flight display that you normally look at for most navigation tasks. Buley said.

“We have a system called TCAS, Traffic Collision Avoidance System, which shows the traffic in your area. It’s just another tool we use to avoid running into each other in the air. And one of my medical team said they saw something.” It looks like a flash at our 3 o’clock position and I saw what I thought was an airplane flash moving north. I looked at my TCAS and showed traffic there. That’s when I asked ATC if we had traffic at 2 o’clock and 22.5 miles and they answered “No.” “The orange ball that we saw, we saw it for 10 to 15 seconds at most,” Buley said.

Soon after, a second unusual event occurred, according to Buley.

“A much higher altitude at our 1 o’clock position, just moving like in my field of vision, maybe an inch by an inch, so a pretty small area that was just moving. And then within 10 to 15 seconds it disappeared,” Buley said. “The weirder one was the one you hear the most throughout the video. That was the specimen that was at our altitude and came towards us and stayed there for about three to five seconds, and then it flew back out over the ocean.” , above the horizon.

This third mysterious sighting showed the strangest behavior for Buley. He described his hyper-fast speeds.

“Almost like a boomerang. Go out, disappear, then come back and sit there,” he said.

Buley said they spotted this mysterious UFO as they flew all the way to North Bend. And even observed it on the way back to Aurora before finally losing sight of it towards Florence. He admits his crew members could see it better when Buley tried to fly, but he saw it just as well as its appearance on his traffic accident warning system.

“That’s strange. I don’t know it. I mean, the sky is pretty big at night,” he said. “Look, I mean, I don’t know. Just a light that we couldn’t figure out what it was. It wasn’t panic or anything like that.”

Some researchers suspected it was sunlight reflecting off one or more satellites like Starlink, which has reportedly happened before over the Pacific Ocean. Buley doesn’t rule out that possibility, but he has seen a lot of satellites.

“I’ve seen satellites, stuff like that, Starlink crossovers, stuff like that. This was definitely different. I’ve never seen lights change direction. Most of the time it just goes from one point in the sky to another,” he said. “Satellites don’t normally change direction. Then again, I could be wrong, but I honestly don’t think it was. I’ve never seen that a satellite moves like that. And they don’t normally move at the same speed.” that speed.

Crew members aboard his flight took cellphone footage of the UFO, but the dark sky made it difficult for their iPhone cameras to spot it. The only thing that could be seen is an orange spot on the video that seems to fade in and out. Buley describes it as the UFO approaching and receding from his aircraft at a distance of 20 or more miles.

“Of course, it’s difficult to film something with an iPhone from a moving object, and I’m trying to film an object that’s moving at night too. I don’t know how to explain this to anyone. I mean, there’s a lot of videos out there and with technology these days, who knows what’s what? I would say the only thing I would say is watch YouTube videos of Starlink compared to what this is and when you do it you can tell it’s not Starlink What we noticed: If you make your screen as bright as possible, look at it in a dark room and zoom in a little, you can see it coming toward us “And then you’ll see it disappear over the horizon,” Buley said.

Buley, his crew and Life Flight administration do not believe Buley’s team was in danger. He said everyone involved, including the air traffic controllers who exchanged numbers with Buley to get the cellphone video, wanted to know what it was.

“Usually it’s not a good thing for an air traffic controller to ask you to write down a phone number. This time it’s different. Yes, I think he’s just as serious as we are. “That’s why we’re trained to do the same thing every day,” he said.

“Our TCAS system to avoid traffic collisions should go so far that it does not pose a safety risk. We have so-called RAs telling us to move. I received no warning that we were in any kind of danger. So it was just a situational warning,” he said.

Buley again described TCAS in a way that would seemingly refute the theory that the phenomenon was the reflection of light from a satellite.

“That’s the other interesting thing. TCAS works with a transponder code. So they issued a transponder that tells ATC and other aircraft your position and altitude. So if something is to be registered, it will be registered like an airplane. That’s the strange thing. “The thing is we saw it as a plane on the plane, but air traffic control didn’t show it on their radar,” he said.