Description

Date: January 14th 2025

Time: 9:20PM-10:15PM PST

Location: Visalia, California, USA

I'm a filmmaker who has some high end gear. I've been following the "drones" since they started being seen and have seen most of the posts on this sub. Last night I went upstairs and noticed this flashing light above the trees out our window towards the West. 10 minutes later I came back and it was still there. I always check FlightRadar as well as NightSky 3D to confirm what I'm looking at. This object with flashing lights continued to fly the same/similar route for the next 45 minutes while I recorded through the window on my Red Raptor 8K VV Camera and Laowa Ranger 75-180 Zoom lens (It's the longest lens I have). There is a small municipal airport in Visalia, but this did not come from there and it did not return there. At the end of the recording (ran out of card space), the object starts to fly away in a south direction. I checked the flight logs at the Visalia Airport and nothing took off or landed after 8PM last night.

Whatever this thing is, it flew for a long time, and when you speed up the footage, I noticed it seems to be circling. There were no traffic incidents, emergency responses, etc anywhere near last night. I lived in LA for 15 years and I'm used to helicopters circling crashes, etc. I fly a drone occasionally, and this thing was in the air for far too long to be a hobby drone. Yes, this is a heavily agriculture area, but there aren't many spray drones yet and this one seems way too high to be spraying a field. The crop dusting planes fly much lower compared to this. In the video you can see normal air traffic crossing frame occasionally.

I have included the Red camera video in MP4 format (de-noised since I shot at 12,800ISO), screenshots of my location and the direction I was looking, FlightRadar screenshots, and the screenshot of NightSky 3D, as well as photos of my camera setup so you can verify I'm not making this up. Again, I'm quite a distance away, so you can't make out what the object is or its shape

To make things even more strange, on January 6th @ 6:26PM, a US Army Blackhawk (MAKO69) flew over my house several times and would turn their spotlight on the field next to us and then do a wide circle and return. This happened several times. I've included those screenshots as well. Not that they are related, but they seem to be flying in the same area.

Here are all the files I described above: Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14qQw9nWfC0X-hYKuObftlpnGRgG8C…)

If it appears again I'll drive out closer to that area with my cameras and try to get a better shot. A couple times it even looked like some random flashing white lights (like bulb flashes) happened in the same area unrelated to anything on flight radar or this object. Not saying it's what everyone else is seeing, just odd and a first for me who's always looking up.

Any ideas?