Barry Earsman

[] = edited info for privacy "I am a [Major US Carrier] A320/321 Captain, the following sighting occurred during one of my flights recently.  Since I have shared my story, several other [Major US Carrier] pilots have reached out to me and shared their similar experiences, including sharing their video recordings of these objects from the Flight Levels.  All seen at the base of the big dipper. [Last week of July], 2023, I departed Santo Domingo DR at 2305 destined for New York JFK.  My route of flight was L453 in NY Oceanic airspace, non radar hundreds of miles offshore.  At approximately 1 hour into the flight as we were approaching the southern boundary of the NY oceanic airspace, and at 32,000 feet,  I called out a visual on traffic that was excessively bright and looked like about 80 miles range... and then disappeared visually.  I never saw the traffic on TCAS.  Then a few minutes later I saw two objects round in shape, one lighted and one not flying in a formation just above the horizon, at a range I guessed of 120-200 NM.  The object/s would illuminate to be as bright as a star for several seconds, then go dark for a few minutes, only to illuminate again.  The brightness would vary from bright to very bright to dark.  The color of the lighted object was white light.  There was a second object you can clearly see in the photos that would follow the illuminated object, but it would not illuminate itself.  Except for the 3:10-3:30 second point of my video I think you can see the second object illuminate.    This went on for the remaining 2-2.5 hours of my flight to NY on L453 in Oceanic airspace.   After reviewing the photos, I think the objects might have been a bit further away, but distance is very difficult to gauge at night. I have the brand new Samsung S23 phone which has the best camera on the market for a cell phone and I started recording this object in video.  I have a great 7 min video of it appearing and disappearing while I was talking to other airliners on 123.45 vhf about it.  You can hear that conversation in the video! Another airliner approximately 400 NM ahead of us at 36,000 feet stated they saw the same thing. I also took about 30 photos of these objects in "night mode" on the phone and they came out really good... in one of them you can actually see the lighted object and the unlit object very clearly as round metallic objects.   All of the photos were taken with some sort of long exposure setting to be able to get as much light as possible to the sensor... You will be able to see in the long exposure photos the stars are pins of light but the UFO's are streaks of light because they are moving!  It is actually amazing!   All of this happened over about a 2.5 hour flight and continued for the entirety of our flight.  The light seemed to be on or just above the horizon until we got closer to our destination of NY.  Just prior to beginning our descent the objects appeared much higher in the sky 80-90 degrees above the horizon and much further away, actually out of the atmosphere."