Across New Hampshire, many people go outside at night to gaze up at the great beyond to enjoy some peace. One of those stargazers is Rick Wright, who recently spotted an odd object in the sky floating above the State House from his house.

He did what any modern person with a cell phone would do: He shot a video.

“I thought it was an airplane until I looked back at it and noticed that it hadn’t moved, and then once the clouds had cleared from it and it was completely visible, I noticed at that point that it wasn’t your standard aircraft,” he said.

He said it didn’t behave like a drone. The sighting left him perplexed. 

“I would definitely say it was a UFO, but that doesn’t necessarily mean extraterrestrial,” he said. “It wasn’t anything that I know about, nothing that I’ve seen.”

Recently, the prospect of life in the stars has been in the news, most notably prompted by numerous drone sightings in the Northeast between last November and December. Those sightings raised discussions online and even drew attention from the government. The reasons for widespread interest in aerial phenomena are not new, and often have been chalked up to a combination of more people looking up, confirmation bias and private drone testing.

The director of the University of New Hampshire Observatory, astronomy professor John Gianforte, is usually preoccupied with what’s going on in the sky light years away like bright, transiting exoplanet systems. But that doesn’t mean he’s oblivious to what’s in the atmosphere and lower orbit.

He explained that the most common observations of unidentified aerial phenomenon (known as UAPs) are the planet Venus, because of its luminosity, size and apparent proximity, but Wright’s video doesn’t align with those sightings. Venus is usually one of the brightest lights in the night sky, but is steady, doesn’t move and is not so low to the horizon.

Recently, Starlink satellites have been going up into the Earth’s lower orbit and have added lots of lights into the night sky. They move in kinear groups and appear differently from most other celestial objects. These satellites have been interfering with amateurs using telescopes and observatory research and have complicated how we study space.

Compared to other states, light pollution in New Hampshire is relatively low except for the central urban areas in the Nashua-Concord corridor. The video was low quality because of the darkness and distance, but there was an object moving at an undetermined speed away from Wright, so it was difficult to identify what it could be.

“We get a lot of helicopters in with the airport, we get planes pretty regularly, but usually passing planes a lot of times at nighttime since the helicopters like to go during the day,” Wright explained. “So, I’ll go out and watch them. Usually, I’ll see your shooting star and other than that, I’m usually just looking at the constellations.”

The first thing Wright noticed was a grouping of flashing lights in the sky. He said the object could not have been more than a mile or two away as he looked south onto Main Street. Two dim lights were steady on either side of the object of a white-yellow hue and what appeared to be multiple bright white, red and yellow lights blinked across between the two dimmer lights.

It was difficult to distinguish the shape of the UAP, but he said it was larger than a plane or a drone and appeared to have flat sides while having an amorphous shape on the top and bottom.  He claimed it was larger than any drone he had seen, but potentially smaller than a plane. 

Gianforte offered what he considered the most likely explanation. After watching the video, he said there’s no clear-cut, 100% certain explanation for what the object could be, but he believes it could have been a drone.

“I don’t know all the rules, but it’s my understanding that drones have to have colored lights on them, a red and a green light, I think,” he said. “And I’ve seen many drones flying at night over at UNH near the observatory, but not everybody follows the rules. What I saw in that video looked very much like a drone, but it did have a bright light on it.”

According to the Federal Aviation Administration’s forecasts for 2025, approximately 1.847 million unmanned aircraft systems weighing more than 0.55 pounds, usually drones of some kind, are registered to fly for recreational use. There are many regulations on the lights, colors and airspace for drones as they have become more common, but not all drone owners follow these regulations.

 Wright admits he has no idea what his video shows. He sometimes posts the things he observes in the sky online, but was hesitant about this one and wanted to learn more before going around claiming he’d seen something not from this earth.

In Gianforte’s opinion, people have to stay open-minded but skeptical, and Wright did the right thing by getting a camera out and trying to find an answer, even if videos like his are hard to interpret.

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