UPDATE: This article has been edited to add a statement from Nellis Air Force Base.
LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — A sighting of lights in the skies above Las Vegas has social media users abuzz over just what it was that was captured on camera.
The lights were seen on June 21 at 10:31 p.m. in Henderson, looking north over the Las Vegas valley. In the video, the bright object in the sky appears to hover before another bright light appears below it in the shape of an arc. The witness says the event occurred for 20 minutes.
“I could see two of them earlier,” a voice says in the cell phone video. “What is that?”
Joe and Nhia Bigornia, who captured the video, described the moment they saw the phenomenon.
“We were biking the River Mountain Loop in Henderson and noticed the object morphing into different shapes the first time, then it disappeared only to come back and do it again,” they said.
The River Mountains Loop trail, according to traillink.com, extends 35.3 miles.
It “surrounds the River Mountains connecting Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Hoover Dam, Henderson, Boulder City and the rest of the Las Vegas Valley,” according to the River Mountains Loop Trail website.
The pair said it was not until the third time it appeared that the phenomenon was captured on camera.
“We are a videography company, so it’s unfortunate that I didn’t have this on a zoom lens,” said Joe and Nhia, who head Big7 Media. They say they weren’t the only ones who saw the unidentified lights in the sky.
“As we were loading our bikes in the truck, a group of teenagers in the parking lot also were talking about it,” they said.
Social media users were happy to see that someone captured the incident that they saw with their own eyes.
“I was hoping someone had a video I thought I was trippin,” said one such user.
What was seen in the skies above Las Vegas is not immediately apparent. FAA officials said they had no reports of unusual activity at the time. Nellis Air Force Base officials agreed, saying, “Nellis Air Force Base does not have documentation of operations or aircraft activity over Las Vegas on June 21.”
One expert thinks the lights look like a launch, similar to the Falcon 9 scheduled for the night of June 21, the same night the video was captured.
“Based off the video, I would immediately have thought a launch,” said Dr. Andrew Kerr, manager of the College of Southern Nevada Planetarium. “It seems to be almost the right timing.”
Kerr said the split of the lights from one source to two could represent the booster from a rocket separating from the Falcon 9 Starlink rocket. That explanation rings true, except that the Falcon 9 launch occurred two hours after Bigornia captured the anomaly on camera.
With recent high-profile alleged encounters in the Las Vegas area, there’s no doubt that more people are keeping their eyes on the skies and their phones at the ready in case something should appear in the darkness above the Las Vegas valley.
