A California resident named kevinmc360 has posted this to YouTube:
I’d have to credit this as a pretty good bit of film. Not only does kevinmc360 establish some preliminary reference footage of conventional, identified aircraft in the area (there’s a big airport in Oakland), but he also provides a good, steady commentary, refraining from the hyperactive whoops and exclamations and unfounded assumptions that often blight UFO clips.
That these lights are ‘UFOs’ is a given: they are flying, and they are as yet unidentified. Beyond that, the user makes no claims. They are presumably a regular occurrence, in view of his ability to say that they will appear in ten seconds (or the fact that he’s there recording them at all). Since his infrared camera appears to have a fairly small aperture, covering only a tiny portion of the sky, it’s possible that he could see the objects off camera before he aimed at them to start recording. On the other hand, he is heard to remark in the commentary that the objects cannot be seen with the unaided eye, and can only be seen in IR. He asks his wife to confirm this, and assures us that she agrees.
So the universal question with UFO movies persists: “How come you were filming that particular piece of empty sky at that particular time?”
On the comments for his video, kevinmc360 says:
“They are not visible with the naked eye. They can only be seen in IR. They fly With out navigation lights turned on, They are over Oakland ATC. One of the most congested ATC’s on the planet.”
This is interesting in itself – although not being an expert in American ATC procedures I don’t know whether there might be any circumstances in which a military flight (which several people suggest it might be) might be cleared across a busy TMA without running lights.
Some suggest the lights are birds, but this seems unlikely to me. The manoeuvre noted whereby the objects spread out for a moment before grouping back together does seem birdlike, as does the formation itself, and birds, being warm, would appear in infrared. But the scale doesn’t seem quite right, although of course with featureless lights it’s difficult to see whether they’re small, close and slow as birds would be, or large, fast and distant, as for aircraft.
