Camera trap in Chile detects strange lights blazing through the wilderness. Researchers are scrambling to explain them.
On January 21, at 12:22 p.m., the local time, in the silence and darkness of the region of Chile Patagonia, a camera trap used to monitor fauna for a project managed by the University of Magallanes (Umag) captured, in 2 seconds, three photographs showing intense lights moving down.
Everyone was disconcerted.
“On a camera located at the edge of a meadow, far from any public route and focuses on a flat horizon, some lights appeared that we cannot explain”, biologist Alejandro Kusch said in a Podcast Umag in August. “Apparently, these lights, which are initially distant, approach and remain in front of the camera, the dazzling, in a movement that seems to descend.”
Kusch is one of the leaders of Public basic projectwhich uses 65 camera traps distributed between continental Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of Chile, to record terrestrial animals, in particular the felines. Since the start of the project in November 2023, at least 365,000 images and videos have been collected; However, only these three photographs show this phenomenon.
Umag shared images with a variety of organizations, from the general management of Chile of civil aeronautics (Sefaa)At UFO Museum in Serenaand several people who analyze abnormal air phenomena.
The potential explanations went from an arachnid approaching very close to the lens of the camera to that of a “plasmoid”, a short form of plasma rarely observed in the wild which can be behind phenomena such as the lightning of ball. However, all specialists have agreed: for the moment, there is no conclusive explanation.
This observation is unique because it was recorded as part of a scientific project, known as Rodrigo BravoResearcher of the Environmental Study Group (GEA) in Umag and member of the Public Basic Project. This means that there is no possibility of fraud or manipulation, because the camera traps operate under rigorous protocols and are equipped with an infrared system, a motion sensor and other features that would prevent people from falsifying with them, he argued.
“This is not the first time that these phenomena have been described in the region, but it is the first time that they have been recorded in this way,” Bravo to Live Science.
In relation: No extraterrestrial in the first UFO report of NASA – but large questions remain
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Bad lights
Local Mapuche people traditionally speak of “bad lights”, which they think are spirits that appear in the fields. This raises the possibility that the camera traps finally capture a phenomenon that has long been recognized in the region.
But even if these strange flashes are the “bad lights” of which Mapuche speak, what are they?
One possibility is that the lights are unidentified air phenomena (UAP), perhaps from a mysterious flying object. Some pentagon files declassified on Uap show similar characteristics, added Bravo. Generally, poor quality data mean that most UAP observations cannot be confirmed or explained, but Current explanations Include foreign spy drones and “airborne size” like birds and meteorological balls.
To respond to this possibility, Umag sent photos and videos to Freddy Alexis, who discusses UFOs and other unknown phenomena on its television programs on UCVTV, the station of the Catholic University of Valparaíso.
Alexis wrote two reports on his results, which included trajectory, spectrography and rescue analyzes of photographs and videos. In the second report, he wrote that a single “luminous stimulus” is visible, not two, and that the other “lights” are reflections of internal lenses.
According to Alexis, primary light can be a plasmoid, or an incandescent ionized gas bubble which is confined by the local magnetic field of the earth, and which can remain stable for a few seconds. The most familiar atmospheric example is bullet lightning, generally associated with storms. But this is where his explanation strikes a wall. “It was summer, with 48 degrees fahrenheit [8 degrees Celsius]And there were no electric storms, “said Alexis to Live Science.” There were no atmospheric conditions for a storm, so it is very unlikely that the lightning light could have been formed. “”
But more exotic plasmoids have been offered in special conditions, such as transient changes and located in the magnetic field of the earth.
However, Alexis noted that there can be other poorly understood atmospheric plasmoids, similar “Mysterious lights” by Hessdalen, Norway. Like the phenomenon of magallanes, these lights defy conventional explanations and could involve plasma structures which are still poorly understood.
In one of his reports, Alexis also calculated that, assuming that it was a distant and flying object, he would have moved at a speed of 590 MPH (947 km / h), about 0.7 times the speed of the sound. Alexis suggested that the lights may not be a flying object, but some plasmoids can move at high speedhe added.
A strange creature
In a separate report, the technicians of the UFO Museum in the Serena suggested that a spider or a butterfly may have inadverted the camera sensor. Indeed, in the first photo, which seems to be an insect or an arachnid can be seen along an image edge. However, the insect does not appear in the following photos.
While the possibility is that the insect triggered the camera, this would only explain why the photo was taken, and not why a brilliant light and similar to a blob appears, said
Cristian RiffoDirector of the UFO Museum in the Serena, which was also consulted for the UMAG report.
Riffo noted that camera traps are designed to minimize the false positives caused by insects, lasers or other stimuli. He thinks that the rapid sequence of photos, in which the light seems to move to the camera, is confusing and difficult to explain.
“It could be two different phenomena: one natural, which sparked the camera, and the other, a light phenomenon, which remains unexplained,” Riffo told Live Science.
The museum researchers analyzed before and after the photographs taken by the same camera, day and night, in the presence of fauna and in different atmospheric conditions, and examined the manufacturer’s manual to exclude technical failures. So far, “they have not found any explanation,” said Riffo.
For this reason, researchers from the La Serena OVNI museum plan to do their own work on site in the region to collect additional data and analyze other local parameters, such as the land, lighting conditions and environmental factors.
Bravo added that the surveillance project in the region should continue up to 10 more years, and that more camera traps are planned, which hopes that this strange phenomenon can be captured again.
“The scientists involved are impatient to know what it was. It is also science: it is a question of discovering what is happening in nature,” said Bravo.
During this time, the mystery remains, and therefore the scientists and those who are interested in abnormal aerial phenomena work together to understand it.
