Posted on 03/18/2019 3:29:50 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Around 9pm local time on Saturday, March 16th, 2019, an air ambulance helicopter was flying roughly 15 miles west of central Last Vegas when something odd caught his aided eye. During an exchange with an air traffic controller, the pilot of Mercy Air 21, an Agusta 119 Koala helicopter, noted spotting an unidentified object some distance from his position and only he was likely able to see it in the darkness as he was wearing night vision goggles (NVGs). The controller responded that he had nothing on radar in the area where he was seeing the object, but when he heard the pilot could only see it through his NVGs, he responded with amazement.
You can hear the pilot alert the controller to spotting something over the "Southern Hills area." This is not a topographic landmark, it is a hospital in the southwest corner of the Las Vegas metropolitan area. He notes that the objects appears to be at around 7,000 feet and that it could be a balloon or "something along those lines" and that it is unlit.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedrive.com ...
Probably a helium balloon trailing an infrared cyalume lightstick.
It wouldn’t be detectable on radar and you wouldn’t be able to see it in the dark with the unaided eye. Image Intensification (II^2) NODs also see in the near-infrared spectrum, which is why all the US military’s combat uniforms now have IR-reflective tabs on them. So good guys with II^2 NODs can tell the sheep from the goats.
With NODs you see shooting stars regularly, all night every night, because there are tiny particles continually entering earth’s atmosphere and burning up but making a light hundreds of times too faint for the human eye to see.
Pretty much but daughter said it could be disorienting. Too many light sources could cause glare blindness but the equipment was their savior in marginal night weather and in unfamiliar rural areas. Their training emphasized when to use and when not to use.
And they can say nothing about what it was, too bad.
Sometimes you simply have to use night vision goggles...
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