Lebanon Night-Vision UFO Video

Jim Barnhill was outside with night-vision goggles near Lebanon, Missouri, on May 26, 2012, when four bright lights crossed the pre-dawn sky. Barnhill put the time at 4:49 a.m., and Live Science said about 4:50 a.m. He filmed them through the second eyepiece of his generation 3 PVS-7 goggles, with a Sony Cybershot camera recording at 3x zoom.

Barnhill wrote that the craft appeared at 146 degrees southeast, about three to four miles up, and was traveling northwest. He first discounted it as an aircraft because of the strobe lights, but as it got closer he saw four very bright lights, three of them strobing in a pattern. “I have never seen an aircraft lights look like this so I stayed with the object,” he wrote.

Barnhill uploaded the video to YouTube under the username RaleighUFO, asking the public for help identifying the strange lights, Ghost Theory reported. “I’m actually wanting your help and experience with video editing so this object can be identified – or not,” he wrote. Live Science said the clip stirred up the UFO community.

In enhanced still frames from the video, Barnhill said he could see what appeared to be a dense frame structure connecting the four light corners and running through the middle of the craft from front to back light. After adjusting contrast, hue, and brightness, he determined that the tail light flashed first, then the left light, then the forward light. The right-side light did not appear to flash at all.

Once the craft passed over him, Barnhill turned with the goggles pointed straight up, and the bright lights saturated the goggles and washed out the object. The craft continued northwest toward Eldridge, and then he lost it behind the trees. He couldn’t remember hearing any noise from it, though he noted he was standing about 20 feet from an AC condensing unit that may have come on a few times.

Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, examined the video for Live Science. He wrote that the “UFO” had blinking strobe lights characteristic of known aircraft and flew at an altitude, speed and flight pattern characteristic of known aircraft. He also noted that the United States sees more than 80,000 flights a day, flown by hundreds of aircraft types, from private jets and passenger planes to military aircraft and cargo jets.

To his credit, Radford wrote, Barnhill had recorded the lights of other commercial aircraft for comparison, and he uploaded three of those videos to YouTube under his RaleighUFO account. Radford’s answer was that a light pattern not matching three specific planes only meant Barnhill hadn’t videotaped the same type of plane. He added that night-vision cameras are notorious for poor and misleading images, especially when the cameraman doesn’t stabilize the image with a tripod.

Radford later included the Lebanon video in “The Strangest Non-stories of 2012,” published by Scientific American. Barnhill was sure the lights were of extraterrestrial origin, Radford wrote, but they seemed to have all the makings of an Earthly aircraft.