We Filmed Synchronized Flashes in the Sky - And We Can't Explain Them.

Have you ever seen a "star" that doesn't move, but suddenly blinks out?

I've asked around, and this is actually a fairly common occurrence. These events are so transient and elusive that they basically just get ignored and quickly forgotten.

But when they get caught in a video, possible today with much improved extreme-low-light video cameras, we need to pay attention. We caught several in one video, and they beg for an explanation. We've tended to ignore them in earlier videos as just noise or something, but these finally caught our attention for reasons I'll explain.

On May 18th, 2025, at a MUFON sponsored Sky Watch Party near Guffey, Colorado, we filmed a "satellite" that didn't quite follow a straight-line path across the field of view. In the process of scrutinizing this video we discovered several fast flashes in the sky, details we had previously glossed over. Time to dig deeper!

Most of these flashes looked very much like the other stars in the video, similar in brightness or magnitude, but they only lasted for just one or two frames of the 30-frames-per-second footage.

My first thought was the possibility that the extremely low-light sensitive sensor in our Sony A7Sii camera was randomly adding a noise glitch to one pixel at a time. That makes some sense, but there were other flashes that went beyond this explanation.

We also caught pairs of flashes, located quite a few pixels apart in the video, but synchronized perfectly in time with each other. They weren't located in the same horizontal scan line, or in any other discernable way were they technically tied to each other.

One pair of synchronized flashes were fairly close together, but one was slightly brighter than the other.

Most of the flashes were the same color as the surrounding stars, mostly pure white or slightly yellow. But we did catch one quick flash that was pure red. This "blob" of red light covered several pixels in the video, and it faded over the course of a few frames.

We have seen some flashing satellites in previous videos, but they behaved differently. Most fade in and back out fairly quickly, and most noticeably move across the sky as they "flash". For example, Iridium flares, predictable in past years when their photovoltaic panels were oriented more strictly than they are today, always quickly ramped up in brightness and then just as quickly ramped back down as they reflected sunlight at predictable points in their orbits.

Back in 1999 through 2001, three Starshine satellites were orbited with the intent to flash at observers on the ground. The spherical satellites were covered with small mirrors polished to perfection by students around the country. These flashes were bright but extremely fleeting, enough to allow students to study their orbital mechanics.

The flashes we recorded in May were similar in appearance to the Starshine experiments, except that there's no way flashes from two satellites separated from each other by miles would appear to be perfectly synchronized.

We also quickly ruled out flashes from geosynchronous satellites, such as the fascinating flashes covered in this video . Those flashes occurred in the same spot in the sky at 42 second intervals for over half an hour as the stars slowly drifted past. The reason we ruled geosynchronous satellites out is that our camera was aimed at Polaris, the "North Star", and in the northern hemisphere all geosynchronous satellites are located in a band that arcs across the sky to the south.

So what were these flashes? We honestly don't know, and hence we have to label them as unknowns. In the future, we will log all such anomalies in our videos as we study the satellites and other fascinating details of the night sky. Let us know if you've seen something similar.

Meanwhile, keep looking up!