Shannon / Kerry Coast Airline Pilot Sightings

Friday 9 November 2018. About 45 minutes before sunrise, transatlantic jets were crossing the high-level airspace off Ireland's south-west coast. British Airways Speedbird 94, a Boeing 787, was bound from Montreal to London Heathrow. Virgin 76, a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747, was flying from Orlando to Manchester. A Norwegian Air 737 was heading from Stewart, New York, to Shannon.

About 6.47am. The BA jet was passing over Kerry when its captain called Shannon air traffic control. Were military exercises under way off the west coast? "It was moving so fast," she said. "It appeared on our left hand side and rapidly veered to the north. We saw a bright light and it then just disappeared at a very high speed." She sounded curious, not alarmed. "We were just wondering what it might be."

No military exercises were scheduled. But Virgin 76 had seen something too. "Two bright lights at 11 o'clock seemed to go back over to the right and then climb away at speed." There were "multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory. They were very bright from where we were." One pilot put a number on it. "The speed was astronomical. It was like Mach 2 or something."

Then another voice. "Glad it wasn't just me." Shannon checked its screens. "There's nothing showing on either primary or secondary." The exchange lasted about two minutes. LiveATC.net archived it, and within days it was news in Ireland and far beyond.

Near Coleraine, Co. Derry, Sanday Laverty was driving to work. His dash-cam filmed a bright object shooting across the sky. The clock read 7:44am, but he had not changed it back after daylight saving ended on 28 October. The true time was 6:44am. Three minutes before the BA call.

The Irish Aviation Authority filed a report "following reports from a small number of aircraft on Friday 9th November of unusual air activity," to be investigated "under the normal confidential occurrence investigation process." A spokesman added that it was "unlikely to be aliens." The Irish Defence Forces declined to discuss operations and referred questions to the IAA. Radio Kerry later reported that the IAA found the sightings inconclusive. The report has never been published.

On the radio, the Virgin pilot suggested "a meteor or another object making some kind of re-entry." Aviation journalist Gerry Byrne agreed. "In all probability they were meteorites and it's not uncommon for meteorites to come in at a low angle, a low trajectory into the Earth's atmosphere." Astronomer Apostolos Christou of Armagh Observatory and Planetarium told the BBC, "It was most likely what are commonly called shooting stars," adding that such events increase in November.

Dr Chris Lowe called it "in all probability, a meteor or other bits of space junk re-entering," yet found one detail odd: the object reportedly tracked the path of the plane, then veered off. Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick of The War Zone went further. Re-entering objects, they wrote, "do not fly up alongside aircraft, make hard lateral maneuvers, and then accelerate away at high speed."

No one has questioned the recording, and no hoax claims have surfaced. The pilots were never named. In 2022 the case returned in Craig Charles: UFO Conspiracies on Sky History, with Ted Roe of NARCAP commenting. Three crews. A few bright lights. And a question the captain asked plainly: what might it be?