A Life Flight pilot speaks out about witnessing bizarre behavior from mysterious lights in the sky after multiple UFO reports over Western Oregon on December 7.
EUGENE, Ore. – A Life Flight pilot is speaking about a weird phenomenon he witnessed along with his crew on the evening of December 7, after multiple sightings of at least one UFO over Western Oregon.
Joe Buley has been flying since 2013 and now has over 6,000 recorded hours of flight time, but he said he’s never seen anything like this.
“I still don’t even know what it was, so I don’t know. It’s definitely unusual. I don’t know,” Buley said.
A screenshot of video taken by the Life Flight’s crew members appears to show an orange dot on the screen that constantly fades in and out. According to Buley, that is the UFO zooming towards their aircraft and back out over the horizon.
It was a routine flight for his team based out of Aurora, Oregon. They received a call to provide medical transport down towards North Bend on Saturday evening.
“We got a call to go down to North Bend-Coos Bay. And just like any normal transport, we check the weather, check NOTAMs. And then we head on our way down to our call and departing out of Aurora climbing through 7,000 feet, got switched over with Seattle Center, and heard another aircraft report seeing strange things that they weren’t sure what it was, and kind of caught me off guard because you usually don’t hear stuff like that,” Buley said.
Buley asked air traffic controllers about what was reported. They then asked a United Airlines flight who also reported seeing strange lights in the sky.
“And they said it and then replied back to me saying, ‘Medavac 661 Lema Fox, did you copy that?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I heard it.’ My med crew in the back, they were like, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of unusual.’ And we didn’t think really much of it. And continued along our transport, got down near the Corvallis area, and started seeing the weird lights. As you could tell on the recording, the audio recording is pretty much basically what we saw,” Buley said.
That audio recording went viral, clipped from a radio traffic website and posted to YouTube. Buley confirmed his voice is the “N661LF” speaking in that now viral video. The video also contains air traffic controllers communicating with a United Airlines flight from Denver to Eugene that also reported seeing strange objects in the sky.
An image provided by Life Flight of the aircraft similar to the one Buley was flying in on December 7th towards Coos Bay when the UFO sightings occurred.
Buley said he saw at least three, distinct strange occurrences during his flight to North Bend.
“Just an orangish red orb, the one that was moving. They were quite a ways away, probably at least 20 miles away from us. One that kind of moved from a higher altitude, kind of spun down a little bit, and then moved on to the north. At that time, that’s when I looked at my MFD. We have four screens in the Pilatus. One’s our PFD primary flight display, which is the one you’re normally looking at for most of your navigation stuff,” Buley said.
“We have a system called TCAS, Traffic Collision Avoidance System, which shows traffic in your area. It’s just another tool that we use to keep us from running into each other up in the air. And one of my med crews said they saw what looks like a strobe out at our 3 o’clock position. I looked out there and I saw what I thought was an aircraft strobe. The strobe is just a white light, the flashes. And that was moving towards the north. And I looked down at my TCAS and I showed traffic there. That’s when I asked ATC if they had traffic at our 2 o’clock and 22 and a half miles, and they replied with no. And that was the first kind of unusual thing that we saw. The orange orb that we saw, we only saw for 10 to 15 seconds at most,” Buley said.
Soon after, Buley said a second unusual event occurred.
“A much higher altitude at our 1 o’clock position that just kind of moved like in my field of view, maybe an inch by an inch, so pretty small area, just moving around. And then it went away within 10 to 15 seconds,” Buley said. “The more stranger one was the one that you hear most throughout the video. That was the one that was at our altitude that would come up to us and sit for about three to five seconds, and then it would go back out over the ocean, over the horizon.”
This third mysterious sighting displayed the strangest behavior to Buley. He described its hyper-fast speeds.
“Like almost like a boomerang. Go out, disappear, then come back and sit right at that,” he said.
Joe Buley says he has been flying in 2013 and has 6,000 hours of recorded flight time. He says he’s never seen anything like the mysterious lights he saw on December 7th over western Oregon.
Buley said they watched that mysterious UFO as they flew all the way down to North Bend. And watched it even on their way back to Aurora before finally losing sight of it towards Florence. He admits his crew members caught a better look at it as Buley was trying to fly, but he did see it as well as its appearance on his traffic-collision alert system.
“That’s weird. I don’t know. I mean, the sky’s a pretty big place at night,” he said. “You see, I mean, I don’t know. Just a light that we couldn’t figure out what it was. It wasn’t any panic or anything like that.”
Some researchers suggested it was sunlight reflecting off one or more satellites like Starlink, something that has reportedly happened before over the Pacific Ocean. Buley is not ruling out that possibility, but he’s seen his fair share of satellites.
“I’ve seen satellites, stuff like that, Starlink go over, seen stuff like that. This was definitely different. Never seen lights that change directions. Most of the time, it’s just going from one spot across the sky to the other,” he said. “Satellites don’t typically change directions. But then again, I could be wrong, but I honestly don’t think it was. I’ve never seen a satellite move like that. And also, usually, they’re not moving at that speed.”
Crew members aboard his flight took cell phone footage of the UFO, but the dark skies make it hard to see on their iPhone cameras. The only thing that could be made out is an orange speck on the video that appears to be fading in and out, which Buley describes as the UFO approaching and retreating towards his aircraft 20 or more miles away.
“Obviously, it’s hard to film something with an iPhone from an object that’s moving and trying to film an object that’s also moving at night. As far to explain, I don’t know how I would explain to someone. I mean, there’s lots of videos out there and with technology nowadays, who knows what’s what? I would say look at about the only thing I’d say is look at YouTube videos of Starlink versus what this is, and you can tell it’s not Starlink. If you make your screen, what we’ve noticed is if you make your screen bright, as bright as it’ll go, and you watch it in a dark room and you kind of zoom in a little bit, you can see it coming in at us, and then you’ll see it disappearing out over the horizon,” Buley said.
Buley, his crew, and administration at Life Flight do not believe Buley’s team was in any danger. He said everyone involved, including the air traffic controllers who exchanged numbers with Buley in order to get the cell phone video, want to know what it was.
“Usually when a controller asks you to write down a phone number, it’s not a good thing. This time it’s different. Yeah, I think he’s just as serious as we are. Yeah. I mean, usually, flying is pretty you know the same thing. Same thing day after day. That’s why we’re trained to do the same thing. So that way, we’re ready for emergency situations. So I guess this is just an unusual flight,” he said.
“Our TCAS traffic collision avoidance system is to go as far as how it wasn’t a safety concern. We have what’s called RAs. RA is a resolution advisory, which if it was like something was going to impact the aircraft, it’ll tell us to move. I didn’t get any oral or any alert saying that we were in any kind of danger. It pulled traffic out a long ways out. And so it was just situational awareness. We didn’t have any immediate threat,” he said.
Buley once again described TCAS in a way that would seemingly discredit the theory that the phenomenon was light reflecting of a satellite.
“That’s the other interesting thing. TCAS works off a transponder code. So they put out a transponder, and that tells ATC and other aircraft your position and your altitude. So for something to register, it was registering like an aircraft. So the weird thing is, is we were seeing it as an aircraft inside the aircraft, but ATC wasn’t showing it on their radar,” he said.
