DENVER (KDVR) — Dozens of Coloradans are asking what could have been falling from the sky early Sunday morning. Cell phone video across the state captures three objects moving in unison.
“We were literally just about to walk into the door when I saw what I thought were three jets at first, so I got out my Snapchat and started recording really quick,” Gary Arnijo from Wheat Ridge said. “Usually, you can hear the sound of jets if they were that close, but I couldn’t hear anything.”
Steven Miller, a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at CSU, believed the UFO’s could have been pieces of a satellite making a re-entry to earth.
“It will break up into pieces and each of those pieces might form a trail and, in this video, we might be seeing something of this nature,” Miller said. “It’s a big sky, so the chances of it happening right about your view are very small so we were lucky to have seen this one.”
After this story was posted, FOX31 was given this photo from a photographer based out of Broomfield, Memphis Larson, who captured a formation of three, Boeing C-17A Globemasters. The cargo planes have four engines, which created the quadruple contrails in the sky.
According to radarbox.com, the flight took off at 7:39 PST from Seattle and landed in Charleston, SC at 15:18 EST.
Larson captured this photo the same time Coloradans spotted the UFO’s, which according to the flight tracker, was also the same time the planes flew over Colorado.
Going on amateur video and limited information, it’s no surprise the UFOs were misconstrued. Larson’s photo was much clearer than other footage submitted to FOX31 and possibly taken with a high-powered lens.
“Sorry for the misinterpretation, clearly the mystery has been solved and they were in fact contrails from the group of aircraft. Didn’t mean to mislead anyone here, but based on the limited information I had to review they were reminiscent of a satellite re-entry. I stand corrected!” Miller said.
According to the Boeing website, as of February 2014, there were 260 C-17 Globemasters delivered to the U.S. and several other countries. The U.S. Air Force reports an inventory of 157; Air National Guard, 47; Air Force Reserve, 18, as of May 2018.