The Irish Aviation Authority is investigating several pilots’ reports of mysterious bright lights travelling quickly over Ireland.
According to an audio recording posted on the flight tracking website Airlive – which is run by aviation enthusiasts – the pilot of British Airways flight #BA94 from Montreal to London can be heard speaking to an air traffic controller in Shannon, Ireland about an unidentified object she saw on Friday morning.
The pilot is heard asking Shannon Air Traffic Control if there are any military exercises occurring in the air space she’s flying through. When the controller responds that there aren’t any, the pilot describes what she witnessed.
“OK. It was moving so fast,” she replied. “It came up on our left-hand side and rapidly veered to the north. We saw a bright light and then it disappeared at a very high speed.”
The British Airways pilot said she didn’t think they were on a collision course with the unknown object.
“We were just wondering what that could have been,” she explained.
Following that report, another pilot from Virgin Airlines flight #VS76 from Orlando, Fla. to Manchester chimed in to let air traffic control know that he too saw the lights. He described it as a “meteor or another object making some kind of re-entry.”
The pilot also said he thought it appeared to be “multiple objects” following the same trajectory.
“[They were] very bright from where we were,” he said. “Very interesting, that one.”
According to Airlive, there was another pilot who also reported seeing the unidentified object.
On Tuesday, the Irish Aviation Authority confirmed it was looking into “reports from a small number of aircraft” about “unusual air activity.”
In its statement, the authority added that the reports would be investigated “under the normal confidential occurrence investigation process.”
With files from The Associated Press
