Expert: Mysterious object spotted during News 4 broadcast likely bird, not UFO

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — A mysterious object spotted in the night sky during a live News 4 broadcast had viewers online buzzing about UFOs, but experts say the bright, fast-moving figure was likely something much more ordinary.

It was just about one minute into News 4’s 9 p.m. newscast on CW 43 last Friday when 4Warn Storm Team Meteorologist Aaron Brackett walked in front of the green screen and did something he’s done countless times over his 15-year career.

“And a lot of times, you know, I start out with a sky cam,” Brackett said.

Friday, he showed a sky camera near Penn Square Mall, pointing northwest. That’s when something caught his eye.

“I start seeing this object and it’s flying faster, moving faster than anything I’ve really observed out there,” Brackett said. “It’s going down, it’s moving really quickly. It’s bright, it’s got some light to it. And I kind of called attention to it.”

“I wonder what that is right there?” Brackett said during the broadcast. “Pretty interesting. Moving really fast!”

After the newscast, Brackett and his News 4 coworkers downloaded the video and took a closer look.

“I immediately clipped it so that a couple of people around here could look at it in high definition and kind of rewind it,” he said. “We must have watched it 100 times over.”

He posted the clip on social media.

It quickly spread, making its way from social media platforms 'X,' to TikTok, and Reddit, getting thousands of views and shares.

Several online publications ran headlines declaring Brackett had caught a UFO live on air.

Commenters on social media had their theories, ranging from aliens to a bird, to a plane, or even a helicopter.

News 4 showed the footage to Chopper 4 pilot Mason Dunn.

“At first I thought it might be a spotlight from the ground, maybe the rotating beacon at an airport,” Dunn said. “But it just it doesn’t look like that to me. So I have no idea what it is.”

One thing he was sure of:

“I’m pretty confident that it wasn’t a plane or a helicopter,” Dunn said. “That light is moving very fast, even faster than an airplane would. If it were a plane, it would have taken longer. Now I’ve seen comets and things fallen from the sky during the night when you’re flying.”

So maybe it was something from space?

News 4 took that theory to astronomer Wayne Harris-Wyrick.

“I first start to think, is that a possible meteor?” Wyrick said. “Because they do enter the atmosphere. Or, is that returning like a second stage or burnt-out stage of a satellite of some kind? There’s certain things you look for in both of those. It didn’t fit any of those at all.”

And Friday wasn’t exactly stargazing weather either.

“It was mostly cloudy that night,” Brackett said.

Harris-Wyrick said that if it had been a meteor, there would have likely been other signs.

“You would have heard noises and you had had reports of like a typical meteor that makes a streak across the sky that lasts, you know, a second or so,” he said. “You’re not going to see that through clouds.”

This isn’t the first time he’s been asked to decipher a mysterious flying object caught on camera. Almost every time, he says, there’s a plausible explanation.

“I just think it seems unlikely to me that any aliens can fly hundreds or thousands of light years here and, you know, do stuff like that in our sky,” Harris-Wyrick said. “If they’re going to come here, they’re going to probably be invisible to us.”

As for all the online theories, Harris-Wyrick is pretty sure he knows what actually happened in the video.

“I think it’s a bird,” he said. “I’m guessing that camera probably has an infrared camera, which means you’re going to see it differently than you would in daylight with sunlight on it. You see all the lights of the city down below, I think just getting light from the city coming up. And as it flaps its wings, which I think it’s doing, you get net change of lighting pattern.”

Regardless, it was a close encounter with something that Brackett won’t forget.

“We’re always seeing airplanes going up and down and we’ve seen hot air balloons, all kinds of cool stuff,” Brackett said. “This really stuck out.”