A Jackson Hole resident was watching a live webcam of Spring Creek Ranch late Sunday night when she witnesses the unexplainable. At 3:41 a.m, while working a night shift, the woman watched an eerie glow crawl across her computer screen for three minutes, giving off a flash of light halfway through.

The woman, who spoke with Buckrail, explained that “my coworker thought something was broken on the camera. It could have been a meteor, but it was moving too slowly and seemingly too close to the ground.” A plane, perhaps? “I checked online, there weren’t any flights that I could find at that time.” Her findings were confirmed by the US Department of Transportation website, which showed a complete absence of air traffic at the time.

Many will likely attribute the strange light to a meteor and move on; after all, it occurred in the midst of the Perseid Meteor shower. But experts say otherwise. Three independent astronomers all concluded that the light could not have been a meteor. First, meteors move far faster than the recorded object, which took over 3 minutes to cross the sky. Second, meteors leave trails of light in their wake; the object left none. Finally, the recorded object is far too bright to be a meteor, and the flash of light it produced is unlike anything a meteor might emit.

Original Full Length Webcam Video



So what else could it be?

Michael Brotherton, an Astronomy Professor at the University of Wyoming, noted that “there does seem to be a flash of light from the object partway through that is likely artificial.” With this in mind, he says that a drone hypothesis is plausible. Brotherton also explained that “webcams are pretty low-light sensitive, so it might not actually be as bright as it looks on camera.”

But who flies their drone at 3:41 a.m., and how and why did it give off a random flash of light?

We may never know, but one thing is for certain, TGR has plenty of identified flying objects you can check out.