(MYSTERY WIRE) — A truly mysterious series of lights were seen by people in the Las Vegas valley earlier this week.
The lights, as seen in several videos and photographs, appeared over Las Vegas around 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 1. People on different sides of the city have reported seeing them.
In the video and pictures you can clearly see four to eight lights. While hard to tell, most of the lights appear to be floating without much movement.
One witness to the spectacle was Melanie Smith. She lives on the fourth floor of a building a couple miles south of the Las Vegas Strip. She says she saw the lights appear twice between 7:30 and 8:30.
In her video she is recording looking north. You can see seven lights at first. Four grouped together to the left of her view (west), another light is seen lower than the others, and two more to the right.
In her second video she notices an eighth light that appears only for a few seconds, but as she says in the recording it looks like it was on fire.
In another video posted to Twitter, the person who recorded this video writes it looked like the lights were over Circa in downtown Las Vegas. Nexstar’s Mystery Wire contacted Circa and were told it had nothing to do with lights in the sky.
Another video posted to the @ContactTour1 Twitter feed shows the lights from someone recording in the southeast part of the valley looking northwest.
Mystery Wire was able to locate the same location where this video was recorded. It is from Horizon Ridge Parkway near Horizon Drive. In a daytime Google Maps image you can see the same street signs and view looking over the valley.
Nellis Air Force Base is on the right of this view on the other side of the large mountain peak approximately 15 miles away. There have been several comments online that the lights were military flares from Nellis jets. We contacted Nellis and have yet to receive a response.
Stephen Demeter emailed Mystery Wire these three photographs from the far southern part of the valley. He wrote, “We took these pics last night around 8:00 pm (Monday). We are in the Club at Madeira Canyon and look north to the airport and the strip.”
Demeter’s son-in law also emailed Mystery about his pictures of the lights. He said he works with the Department of Homeland Security and said his mother-in-law, who was with Stephen, said she saw a “mass behind the lights, like it was one large object and not separate aircraft.”
This man also said he has experience with military flares, both aerial and artillery launched, and he does not think these resemble that at all.
Wednesday afternoon, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did respond, writing the lights seen from the Las Vegas valley were “flares from the NW military ranges.”
The Air Force does use the airspace on the north end of the Las Vegas valley to fly between Nellis AFB and Creech AFB which is approximately 40 miles NW of Las Vegas.