In the far south of Chile, where Patagonia folds into silence and ice, a camera trap set to watch cats caught something much stranger. At 12:22 a.m. on January 21, the device snapped three photos in two seconds. Instead of a puma or fox, it recorded blazing lights seemingly dropping out of the sky.
The trap belongs to the University of Magallanes’ Public Baseline project, which has 65 cameras scattered across Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego to track local wildlife. Since launching in late 2023, the network has gathered hundreds of thousands of images. Only these three stand out.
“On a camera located at the edge of a meadow, quite far from any public road and focused on a flat horizon, some lights appeared that we cannot explain,” biologist Alejandro Kusch said in a university podcast. “Apparently, these lights, which are initially distant, approach and remain in front of the camera, dazzling it, in a movement that appears to be descending.”
The photos were sent everywhere, from Chile’s civil aviation authority to the La Serena UFO Museum. Theories have ranged from a spider crawling across the lens to a rare “plasmoid,” a bubble of plasma sometimes mistaken for ball lightning. But it wasn’t storming that night.
“There were no atmospheric conditions for a storm, so it is very unlikely that ball lightning could have formed,” researcher and broadcaster Freddy Alexis told Live Science. He suggested the flashes may resemble the still-unexplained lights of Hessdalen, Norway.
UMAG researcher Rodrigo Bravo noted that camera traps follow strict protocols, ruling out tampering. “This is not the first time these phenomena have been described in the area, but it is the first time they have been recorded in this way,” Bravo said. Indigenous Mapuche communities have long spoken of “bad lights” crossing the fields, and the cameras may have finally caught what they described.
The monitoring project will continue for another decade, and more fieldwork is planned in the region. “The scientists involved are eager to know what this was,” Bravo said. “This is also science. It’s about discovering what happens in nature.”
Three blurry frames aren’t proof of aliens or spirits. They’re proof that even now, the universe can throw something at us we can’t explain.
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