The Ridge Recording

I set up the night-vision camera on the eastern ridge two nights ago. The ridge gives a wider view than The Clearing—you can see about fifteen miles of sky above the tree line.

At 3:22 AM, the camera captured something.

A single object, moving fast from south to north. No navigation lights. No contrail. Based on the frame rate and the angular distance it covered, I estimated the speed at somewhere north of Mach 2. Maybe Mach 3. It crossed the visible sky in about four seconds.

The SDR picked up a brief burst of broadband noise at the same moment—like every frequency lit up at once for half a second, then silence.

I spent the next morning going through the footage frame by frame. The object isn't a point of light. It has structure. Oblong, maybe thirty feet across if my distance estimates are right. But distance estimates from night-vision footage are unreliable at best.

Here's what I have to be honest about: I checked the military flight logs for the nearest base. There were training exercises that night. Fast-mover exercises, specifically. Fighter jets doing supersonic runs are exactly what Mach 2-3, oblong-shaped, no-visible-nav-lights looks like on night-vision from fifteen miles away. At that distance, nav lights might not resolve.

The broadband noise burst is consistent with radar sweeps from military aircraft at close range.

So do I have footage of something unexplained, or do I have footage of an F-15 on a training run?

I genuinely don't know. The speed estimate has a margin of error that includes both possibilities. The shape is ambiguous. The SDR data is consistent with either explanation.

What I can tell you is that I've watched military jets on night-vision before. Something about this looked different. The way it moved—no banking, no course correction. A straight line, perfectly level. Jets adjust. This didn't.

But "it looked different to me" isn't evidence. It's an impression. And impressions lie.

I'll keep the camera on the ridge.