Mysterious lights documented by a remote camera in Patagonia perplexed scientists in January.(Image credit: Courtesy of Rodrigo Bravo Garrido)ShareShare by:
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On January 21, at 12:22 a.m. local time, in the calmness and pitch-black of Chilean Patagonia, a camera set up to observe fauna for an initiative conducted by the University of Magallanes (UMAG) registered, within 2 seconds, three photos displaying vibrant lights shifting downward.
Everyone felt puzzled.
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Kusch is among the frontrunners of the Public Baseline venture, which employs 65 camera units positioned across continental Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, at Chile’s southern extremity, to document land-based animals, notably felines. Since this undertaking launched during November 2023, a minimum of 365,000 images and footage pieces have been amassed; even so, solely these trio of photos captures the unusual event.
UMAG disseminated the pictures to diverse bodies, extending from Chile’s General Directorate of Civil Aeronautics (SEFAA) to the La Serena UFO Museum, also to several individuals analyzing irregular airborne occurrences.
Possible interpretations spanned from an insect nearing extremely close to the camera’s lens to a “plasmoid,” an ephemeral form of plasma seldom witnessed naturally which might underlie incidents such as ball lightning. Nonetheless, every specialist concurred: at present, there exists no definitive justification.
This detection holds uniqueness due to its documentation within a scientific venture, stated Rodrigo Bravo, a researcher linked with the Environmental Studies Group (GEA) at UMAG and part of the Public Baseline initiative. This indicates an absence of potential fabrication or distortion, since the cameras run following stringent protocols and include an infrared mechanism, movement detector, and other attributes that avert people tampering with them, he asserted.
“It’s not the first occasion these events have been depicted within this locale, but it marks the first instance of being documented in such a way,” Bravo shared with Live Science.
Image 1 of 3
(Image credit: Courtesy of Rodrigo Bravo Garrido)
A sequence of images captured by UMAG’s camera trap. The entire sequence took 2 seconds to record.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Rodrigo Bravo Garrido)
The sequence of the recording captured by UMAG’s camera trap.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Rodrigo Bravo Garrido)
The sequence of the recording captured by UMAG’s camera trap.
Bad lights
The indigenous Mapuche populace commonly refer to “bad lights,” which they perceive as spirits materializing across the terrain. This opens the possibility of the cameras finally capturing an occurrence that has been recognized inside the area for years.
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But even if these strange flashes are the “bad lights” the Mapuche speak of, what are they?
A potential explanation points to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), potentially stemming from an enigmatic airborne entity. Certain declassified Pentagon records concerning UAP display equivalent attributes, Bravo incorporated. Mostly, scarce data leads to most UAP encounters lacking authentication or definition, yet widespread accounts entail foreign espionage drones coupled with “airborne clutter” comprising avians and atmospheric balloons.
To deal with that eventuality, UMAG conveyed photos and footage over to Freddy Alexis, discussing UFOs together with other unidentified occurrences on his TV broadcasts aired on UCVTV, the network tied to the Catholic University of Valparaíso.
Alexis composed a duo of reports summarizing his findings, encompassing trajectory, spectrographic, including relief analyses applied on the images and footage pieces. Through the subsequent report, he elaborated that merely a solitary “luminous source” gets displayed, rather than a pair, and that the surplus “lights” stand as inner lens reflections.
According to Alexis, the core light might constitute a plasmoid, otherwise defined as an incandescent ionized gas pocket bound due to Earth’s localized magnetic zone, additionally capable of holding stability spanning some seconds. The vastly acknowledged atmospheric counterpart entails ball lightning, conventionally associated near storms. Nonetheless, this explanation halts at a standstill. “It was summer, with 48 degrees Fahrenheit [8 degrees Celsius], and there were no electrical storms,” Alexis informed Live Science. “There were no atmospheric conditions for a storm, so it is very unlikely that ball lightning could have formed.”
A photograph capturing the rare phenomenon of ball lightning. Ball lightning typically occurs during storms, but the weather was clear on the day the lights were recorded.
But more exotic plasmoids have been proposed under special conditions, such as transient, localized changes in Earth’s magnetic field.
Still, Alexis noted that there may be other, poorly understood atmospheric plasmoids, similar to the “mysterious lights” of Hessdalen, Norway. Like the Magallanes phenomenon, these lights defy conventional explanations and could involve plasma structures that are still poorly understood.
In one of his reports, Alexis also calculated that, assuming this was a distant, flying object, it would have been moving at a speed of 590 mph (947 km/h), or roughly 0.7 times the speed of sound. Alexis suggested that the lights might not be a flying object, but some plasmoids can move at high speeds, he added.
A strange creature
In a separate report, technicians from La Serena UFO Museum suggested that a spider or moth may have inadvertently tripped the camera’s sensor. That’s because in the first photo, what appears to be an insect or arachnid can be seen along one edge of the image. However, the insect does not appear in the subsequent photos.
While one possibility is that the insect triggered the camera, this would only explain why the photo was taken, not why a bright, blob-like light appears, said
Cristian Riffo, director of the La Serena UFO Museum, who was also consulted for the UMAG report.
Riffo noted that the camera traps are designed to minimize false positives caused by insects, lasers or other stimuli. He thinks the rapid sequence of photos, in which the light appears to move toward the camera, is baffling and hard to explain.
“It could be two different phenomena: one natural, which triggered the camera, and the other, a light phenomenon, which remains unexplained,” Riffo told Live Science.
A shot from the same wildlife camera where the lights appeared, but during the day. Except for a fence, there are no human-made structures nearby.
Museum researchers analyzed before and after photographs taken by the same camera, during the day and at night, in the presence of wildlife and under different atmospheric conditions, and reviewed the manufacturer’s manuals to rule out technical failures. So far, “they have not found an explanation,” Riffo said.
For this reason, researchers from the La Serena UFO Museum are planning to carry out their own on-site fieldwork in the area to collect additional data and analyze other local parameters, such as the terrain, lighting conditions, and environmental factors.
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Bravo added that the monitoring project in the area is scheduled to continue for up to 10 more years, and more camera traps are planned, raising hopes that this strange phenomenon may be captured again.
“The scientists involved are eager to know what this was. This is also science: it’s about discovering what happens in nature,” Bravo said.
Meanwhile, the mystery remains, and so scientists and those interested in anomalous aerial phenomena are working together to understand it.
María de los Ángeles OrfilaLive Science Contributor
María de los Ángeles Orfila is a science journalist from Montevideo, Uruguay, known for her long-form writing featured in El País and El Observador. She also participated in the Sharon Dunwoody Mentoring Program 2023 offered by The Open Notebook and has bylines in Science, Scientific American, and Discover Magazine, among other outlets.
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