'UFOs' Filmed off of North Carolina Coast Spark Internet Debate

A still image from the video. {William Guy / YouTube)

A still image from the video. {William Guy / YouTube)

A video uploaded to the YouTube channel of William Guy is the latest UFO sighting to spark debate on the internet.

The incident itself reportedly took place on September 18th, and Guy told local news outlets that he is from Indiana, but is in North Carolina as part of a group of workers sent to repair damage on Ocracoke Island caused by intense flooding during Hurricane Dorian.

He filmed the video while aboard a ferry crossing the Pamlico Sound from Ocracoke Island to Swan Quarter on the mainland. According to Guy, the original video he shot was a minute and a half long, but he had to edit the video to 30 seconds in order to upload it successfully.

“Anybody tell me what that is?” Guy asked in the video. “We’re in the middle of the ocean, on a ferry, nothing around. Look. Nothing around. No land, no nothing.”

Pamlico Sound is a large body of water that separates the Outer Banks from mainland North California, and is not part of the Atlantic Ocean. Given Guy's testimony, the ferry would have been travelling northwest at the time of his sighting, and the objects would have appeared in the southwest.

The video has been viewed over 340,000 times since it was uploaded on September 28th, and viewers are divided on what the mystery lights represent.

Some skeptics speculated that the lights might have been caused by floating lanterns, but the majority of skeptical opinions revolved around the use of military flares.

“That's a bombing range out there. We see it regularly. They are phosphorus flares on parachute devices," Paul Blake asserted in the video’s comments section. "Nothing to see here move along."

The Piney Island Bombing Range is approximately 18 miles southwest of the ferry’s path, and would likely have been in the general direction Guy was facing when shooting the video.

A UFO sighting off of Cape Lookout in North Carolina from November of 2018 was also widely speculated to have been caused by military flares.

But not everyone who watched Guy’s video was convinced by that explanation.

"There's no relative motion with the objects (flares move in the breeze, they fall at different rates, and if they were flares we should see a dance of sorts with the lights as they fall.)," Mike Jaeger commented. "Compare the images of the shapes at time :11 with images at :26. The shapes are in the same positions at :11 as they are at :26. Someone was kind enough to link real flares being fired and falling to the earth below in the comments. You can see the flares actually changing altitude, you can see them cross in front of each other in the wind etc... The flares in that video behave very differently than what William Guy captured in his video folks."

Still others were emboldened to share their own observations of mystery lights.

"We saw the lights while near Atlantic Beach, [North Carolina]," Daleen Fisher wrote. "They looked just like this video. They did not fall, they did not move, the entire time we watched them. They stayed stationary, in a fixed place in the sky—in somewhat of a formation. Lights were all on, as this video shows, then some would go out, it seemed two, then maybe [four] more etc. Until all turned off. Then [two] came back on, then [four] on, then [six] or [eight] were on, then all on, then slowly work backward until all off again. I thought they were gone, but then I looked and they were all on again and I watched this repeat. I've heard the explanation of drone light exercises—that seems most plausible, based on what I saw. We were driving when we saw it and I just figured it was the military doing something."

As for Guy, he appears so far to not be entirely convinced by explanations involving military flares.

“A lot of people I have talked to here on the island said it was flares, but they also said they have never seen anything like what I captured,” he said.

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