A documentary has revealed recordings of several pilots who said they saw “bright lights moving in elongated circles” for hours high in the sky while flying routes from Japan and Hawaii to the west coast of the United States.

A researcher released in a video the dramatic air traffic control recordings of US pilots who reported strange sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) while flying over the Pacific Ocean.

The experienced pilots reported seeing “bright lights moving in elongated circles” for hours high in the sky while flying routes from Japan and Hawaii to the US West Coast in August and September.

They themselves tried to film from their cabins the group of between three and five bright objects, which seemed to fly in the area of the sky where the constellation Ursa Major is located.

“We’ve got some planes going north here and they’re circling, at a much higher altitude than we are…”

“Any idea what they are?” asked Mark Hulsey, a pilot flying a Gulfstream charter plane off the Los Angeles coast.

The pilot described seeing “maybe three planes there” and 23 minutes later called the Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) saying, “there are about seven of them now” and estimated they were “at least 5 to 10,000 feet above above us.”

Asked by the controller to elaborate, Hulsey added: “They just keep going in circles.”

“I was an F-18 pilot in the Marine Corps and I tell you I’ve done a lot of interceptions, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told reporters.

Chris Van Voorhis, 63, recounted seeing between three and five objects, much brighter than the stars around him, fading out without a perceptible pattern and moving in a circular “race track” motion, as he flew from Honolulu to Los Angeles in August.

The experienced pilot assured that the objects appeared to be in Earth’s orbit or even further out in space, given its continuous position near the Ursa Major constellation as it flew over the ocean for hours.

“The other airlines were like, Hey, are you seeing what we’re seeing?” the veteran pilot recalled.

“They were lights that turned on very brightly, you saw them move and then they went off” and he clarified that they could not be satellites because they would move linearly and in the same direction.

“It had to be in a very, very high orbit, or even in space quite far from anything that might be a satellite, because every time we saw it, it was in the lower right corner of the Big Dipper, no matter what. part of the world we were.”

“It went on for so long that it actually became almost boring.”

Van Voorhis said that UFO sightings are quite common among pilots: “Of my pilot friends, at least 50% have seen some kind of anomaly,” he said.

“We have a global phenomenon from west of Japan to east of Miami. Whatever it is, the pilots see it from the other side of the world,” he said.

But Hansen said there is currently no proper process for reporting such sightings, even of foreign objects that could pose a threat to the safety of commercial airlines.