26 year pilot, just witnessed something I cannot explain.
Time: 01/04/2025 2318Z
Location: 20 miles NE of Williamsport Airport(KIPT) @ 30,000ft
I've been flying corporate aviation the better part of 16 years. Flown all over the world and many of my hours have been at night, I'm accustomed to seeing how things are supposed to look. Never seen anything unexplained in all my career, the wildest would be a newly launched Starlink chain and some rocket launches..
Last year I invested in a very high spec pair of NVG goggles, mainly to look at the stars from home and to hike around in the woods with at night. I like bringing them on flights at night to look at the stars.
This particular trip we were heading to Newark NJ (KEWR) from the Western US. Having been following the "drone" situation out there and this being a night flight I was looking forward to bringing my NVGs on this particular flight. We were cruising at 45,000 ft Eastbound and the sun began to set. We started our descent around 300 miles from our destination. It was dark enough around 250 miles out that I could start using my goggles. At 250 miles away the entire area around NY, NJ & PA looked like the cameras on the red carpet at the Oscars from all the strobe lights on aircraft over the East Coast. You could see plenty of stars, satellites & even watched the ISS overhead. Upon descending through around 33,000 ft, and with my naked eye and that of my co-pilot, we saw an incredibly bright bluish light, approximately our altitude, and roughly 10 miles away at my 11 0'clock.(I was in the left seat flying). Distances can be deceiving at night and I came up with that distance based on the size of the light, it was rather large. I should also point out we had nothing on our TCAS(a traffic collision avoidance system using transponders of aircraft), nor anything on Foreflight using ADS-B.
The light was getting larger and heading directly at us at approximately our altitude(at this point we were reaching 28,000 ft). I looked through my goggles to get a different view and zero strobe lights or a beacon flashing were showing. Just a round single point of light. The point of light shifted from heading directly towards us to moving past our left wing. It passed within I would approximate 3 miles, staying incredibly bright past my 10'o'clock, 9 o'clock, & upon reaching my 8 o'clock position the light shut off, and a single flashing red light appeared.
Throughout this event I switched between looking at it with my naked eye and back to the goggles. I got a very clear view of it directly off my left side through the goggles. It was an oblong sort of circle with a single point of very bright light shining straight at us, like a car in headlights. Its speed was not anything unusual and was about the speed of a normal aircraft passing by.
I tried running through a series things to disprove what I saw. Normally climbing through 18,000ft you turn off your landing lights and are left with just your strobes and a beacon lights. Okay so maybe they forgot to turn them off all the way up to 28,000ft and also forgot to turn their strobe and beacon on, which is highly unlikely but possible. The really weird thing is that as it passed my and went to my 8 o'clock position the landing lights face forward, these would not have looked like a spotlight shining at me. My next thought was maybe they had the wing light on(this illuminates the leading edge of the wing to look for ice). If this were the case it was slightly above my altitude and still would not have looked as bright or direct as this did(even with the naked eye it was incredibly bright. The the fact the light simply turned off and a blinking red light appeared(which I saw through the goggles and my naked eye), was very strange. Also, had we been down at a much lower altitude I would have chocked it up to a helicopter with a rotating spotlight mounted on it, but I've never seen a helicopter up at 33,000ft. Also ATC would have informed us of aircraft at that location and altitude, and our TCAS would have shown an aircraft.
My one regret was not calling ATC to ask if an aircraft was at that location, even though it did not look like one. Also I did not bother with a video because they never show up correctly at night and I didn't want my attention diverted away from simply observing what I was seeing.
No clue what that was but it was strange. I've included a screenshot of us on ADS-B, no aircraft meeting that location, altitude or description. The one 737 to the almost 6 o'clock position in the screengrab was at 38,000 feet and not in the correct location or direction of travel from what I observed. My aircraft is the blue one lowest in the image.
Anyway, that was strange.
