A pilot captured an odd sight last month while he was flying over the ocean at night.
The post on Reddit — which went viral — showed huge patches of eerie red light lurking beneath the clouds.
“Mysterious red glow seen over the Atlantic, pilot says he’s never seen anything like it. Via July 2022,” the post said.
According to the original poster, the pilot who took the photos is a friend of theirs, Newsweek reported.
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The pilot is Dustin Maggard, who saw and photographed the glow from 31,000 feet over the ocean, CNN’s Jeanne Moos reported Wednesday.
“We had no idea what we were looking at,” Maggard told CNN.
“We were making jokes about being in the middle of some sort of military exercise or some sort of alien invasion,” he said.
Of course, once these photos started circulating the internet, the guessing game was on.
Commenters in the Reddit post discussed theories of what could have caused the red glowing lights.
Many suggested it was caused by UFOs or was a publicity stunt for Netflix’s “Stranger Things.”
But the most plausible answer was in itself pretty fishy.
“They were commercial fishing vessels that were fishing for Pacific saury using very bright red arrays of LED lights,” weather modeling expert Neil Jacobs told CNN.
The red lights attract the saury the fisherman are hoping to catch.
“You can literally see them from outer space,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs had entered the flight’s location and date into GlobalFishingWatch.org, which allowed him to see the fishing vessels by name.
In the video, the red lights appear to have been turned on by one vessel, CNN said. The network posted the segment with English audio on its Spanish YouTube channel.
Pacific saury can be found all around the Pacific Ocean and sometimes the Atlantic, according to Newsweek. They are caught both for consumption and for bait in catching other, larger fish.
Using the bright red lights at night attracts the saury to the surface of the water, where they are then scooped up in nets of the commercial fishing vessels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U7KK1kOoPc
Fishing lamps traditionally were used, but the LED lamps are more efficient and safe for the fishermen to use since they produce less ultraviolent light and less heat.
Similar phenomena have been spotted in the past by pilots and the International Space Station.
So while this incident is not new, it certainly made for an entertaining reaction from the internet.
