The Most Surprising Part of Our Sedona UFO Tour Was What We Couldn’t See

By Jacob Weindling | August 29, 2025 | 11:14am

Screenshot via Ababyraven on Instagram

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The Most Surprising Part of Our Sedona UFO Tour Was What We Couldn’t See

Despite my interest in UFOs and becoming an accidental semi-reporter of them, I have never seen a UFO, and my sister sought to rectify that. I wrote yesterday about my trip to Sedona, America’s capital of woo where my family came to do a lot of things, but an impetus for the trip was my sister pushing me to go see for myself whether this stuff is all that it’s cracked up to be. Denver is within driving range and so we spent a long weekend there, with the last night on Monday being our UFO tour.

We rode into the desert with our two tour guides, parking on top of a hill about 14 miles outside Sedona around Red Canyon Overlook, with Bradshaw Ranch about a mile off in the distance below us, an alleged hot spot for UFO activity. I did not know at the time in the darkness that we were at Red Canyon Overlook, but I vividly recall the mountains around it, and this video from its Google Maps page is exactly the view I remember, with the white-topped formation off to our right all night as we stared out ahead in the direction that video starts out at.

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It was a cloudy night, and it rained on the drive there, but eventually let up around the time we got to the top of the hill where we hopped out of the car, while lightning still routinely lit up the clouds in the distance throughout the night. Our guides brought night vision goggles, and it was quickly becoming pitch black as the darkness set in and the only lights remaining were miles off in the distance. You could see the Sedona city lights behind us and another town off to our left (either Cottonwood or Sedona Pines Resort), but we spent the night just staring out into the distance ahead looking at Bradshaw Ranch, waiting for something to happen. Looking out with the naked eye, there was nothing to see around us but pitch-black darkness. Some planes routinely came over the rocks, lightning flashed around us, and it was a very peaceful, yet uneventful night.

But as soon as each one of us put the night vision goggles up to our eyes, we all could see a flickering light near the top of a mountain across the valley from us. It looked like someone had lit a fire in a cave. It was a constant light in the same spot all night that never turned off and it never did anything strange, save for the fact that it was completely invisible to the naked eye in near pitch-black darkness while very clearly showing up in night vision.

Light on a mountain shot through night vision goggles

Photo by Jacob Weindling

While I am much less certain of exactly which mountains were where off in the distance, the direction I approximated this light in my quest to retrace my steps and eyeballs on Google Maps took me to an area called Hide Out Cave with a historical landmark named Hole in the Rock whose hole looks similar to the photo above. After the confusion of seeing a light so clearly that did not show up in the darkness abated and even normalized itself to a degree, we went back to shuffling around, waiting for something else to happen, all while that light continued to flicker in the infrared (IR).

My sister was the first to spot something. As she was looking through the night vision goggles, she said she saw two lights, one big one on top of another small one underneath it that were moving together. She thought maybe the big light was slowly moving towards the ground because the smaller light got smaller. But she wasn’t sure, she’s more of a skeptic than I am, and she even handed the goggles to the tour guide who said he didn’t see anything strange and thought she may have seen some city lights to our left flickering, and again, nothing was visible to the naked eye. Our other tour guide began playing a native song on a native flute, and a peaceful ambiance came over us.

While my dad stayed with the flute, my sister and I walked in the opposite direction down the hill towards the white capped mountains to our right, just exploring the area. Even if we didn’t see anything, the view was stunning and the lightning storm around us was one heck of a show on its own and it was nice to watch it together. We got far enough into the darkness and decided that was enough blind exploring and headed back up. She handed me the night vision goggles and went to go see what our dad was up to, while I stayed by myself and decided to put them up to my eyes and take a look around. I didn’t see anything.

I tried to take this seriously and put into practice what I have learned is potentially credible diving into the Great Bullshit Ocean of woo: intent seems to matter, so says things like the observer effect. I tried to remain present in the moment and tried to feel open to new things, and I mimicked a story I have heard a few times, saying in my head to no one in particular, “if you would like to show yourself, you can.”

At some point within the next several minutes, a big flash of light filled up the night vision goggles and a bunch of brush and trees on Bradshaw Ranch became clearly visible in infrared from a mile away. It was in the same general direction my sister said she thought she saw the lights slowly moving towards the ground earlier, except I saw it on the ground. Looking at it through the goggles was so intense at first it hurt my eyes a bit, yet when I looked outside the goggles, it was completely invisible.

Here’s video of the bigger light on the ground with a couple glimpses outside the goggles (apologies for the horrendous cameraman, but at least the dummy got some good stuff at the end)

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— Jacob Weindling (@jakeweindling.bsky.social) August 25, 2025 at 11:24 PM

One benefit to my sloppy camerawork is you get glimpses outside the goggles as I struggle to line up the camera inside them, and you can see, there’s nothing visible to the naked eye. With how stunningly bright it was in infrared, we should have easily been able to see it, and yet. We observed it for a minute or so all huddling around the night vision goggles and all seeing this thing, then it blinked off. In the minutes after just wandering around processing what we saw, my sister and my dad spotted an orange light in the sky above the general area where we saw the light on the ground. I was standing around fifty feet behind them down the trail, and so I caught it later in its flight path, but I saw it both with the naked eye and with the night vision goggles.

This orange light flew away at a rate that easily could have been a plane since it looked to be at the same altitude as the few planes in the sky at that same time–save for one detail where if it is a plane, I saw a plane breaking a very serious law. I went back and forth in the night vision goggles looking at nearby planes with very obvious strobe lights flashing, and this orange light that did not have a strobe. It didn’t do anything strange, but the shape also didn’t quite look like the planes in the sky I was comparing it to, and it just calmly glided off into the clouds until I couldn’t see it any longer.

And that was our UFO tour.

I do not know what I saw. I can’t call anything on my UFO tour a UFO because nothing exhibited any of the five observables that fit the government classification system to qualify one as such, and the two lights were on the ground. The less compelling and circumstantial orange light showed no hypersonic speed, no maneuvers that would turn its occupants into soup, no physical structure I can confirm. I am leaning heavily on the word “light” here because that’s as much about this experience as I can confirm.

My logical brain tells me that there are reasonable prosaic explanations for everything I saw. Maybe I’m wrong on my altitude guess and the orange light was lower and is an unrelated drone in the right woo place at the right woo time, and maybe the other two are some sort of powerful infrared spotlight or beacon. But like the strobeless light in the sky, there is a hurdle to clear with this prosaic explanation–but a much bigger hurdle to clear than someone simply choosing to break the law. The one on the mountain, if it was at Hide Out Cave, is a ten mile walk from Bradshaw Ranch. The range on commercially available IR beacons and spotlights I have investigated would not reach us from the top of Hide Out Cave, let alone be as vivid and bright as it was all night, to say nothing of the far brighter light a mile away that still would not reach us through most commercially available IR spotlights. Most models I find max out around a mile or so, with most maxing out well before that range, while the high-end IR products max out around five miles. If these two lights had humans behind them, they had to be humans with access to more high-powered IR technology than you can buy on the internet or in stores.

The Next Day

I drafted the above right as I got back to my hotel after the tour to try to preserve as much of the night as I could remember. If there is one thing I’ve learned diving into this, it’s that humans are not the greatest observers, and memories are hazy, especially when something confusing is happening. It’s why pilots’ testimony is so compelling, because they’re the only people on earth who actually can estimate and understand altitude with their eyes, the rest of us are guessing.

But we got video of…something. All five of us saw it, but only through the night vision goggles. Jay, our UFO tour guide, and I exchanged numbers, and the following day, he texted me that he had hiked to the spot filmed above in that video. He had also posted his much better shot video he took through the night vision goggles of this light blinking out that all of us saw.

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That gave me the heebie jeebies man. The light on the mountain being an IR beacon put there by a someone with access to high powered IR is a very compelling prosaic explanation to me because as my rudimentary understanding of it is after digging into this line of debunking, we would actually see an IR beacon flickering like a fire in a cave from our vantage point if it was in a cave, like, say, Hide Out Cave. I have a much harder time dismissing the one in the field as prosaic solely on the basis of how big and bright it was and how seeing it for myself made me feel.

Jay said he had been recently monitoring that spot we saw the big light at, and when he hiked to it the following day with a Geiger counter in hand, he measured “three times the radiation as the surrounding area” inside this circle of rock surrounded by grass and other living things.

Picture of a circle of rock surrounded by grass and other living things where the light in the titular photo allegedly was

Photo by Jay, our UFO tour guide

He claimed that “just a few weeks ago it was full of growth” and he posted another video explaining what he found here, where there is an incinerated tree next to an untouched one and bits of charcoal spread everywhere.

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A post shared by Juergen Hess (@ababyraven)

I know this all sounds crazy, but this is what happened. I can’t verify for myself that this is the exact spot we saw the light in the field, but looking back at the beginning of his video, that’s definitely on or around the ridge we were standing on, as I remember some very cool lights from the lightning storm bouncing off those mountains to the left (our right that night), and we were definitely looking in the general direction this is being filmed from when we saw the light. Jay was not one of those UFO types who just believes everything and gets lost in the wonder of it all, and he expressed some skepticism when I brought up Luis Elizondo even as he told me that John Lear personally was who got him into this stuff in the first place. While a believer in his experiences, he said he had a scientific education and you could see that in his approach. He had a great quote that night when we were out that “it’s important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out of your head.” My brain and my gut don’t give me any reason to doubt him, and we each filmed the same thing we both saw with three other people. If he says that’s the spot where we saw the big light the night before, I have no reason to disbelieve him, and it is extremely strange how one tree was obliterated into charcoal at one point while the tree right next to it looks completely untouched.

The story our combined experiences tell is hard for me to digest and wrap my head around, but if my sister saw something she thought was going to the ground, I saw something on the ground, then we all saw something in the sky above that same spot and the next day there are higher readings of radiation on that spot…something radioactive may have landed and then left. That is hard for me to accept, even after writing this, but my logical brain is telling me that’s Occam’s Razor outside the prosaic explanations.

It’s possible these lights could have a conventional explanation, but it would be a more compelling case if it took place in literally any other city in America. Sedona really believes all this stuff is happening every day, and they don’t care if you think they’re weird. This widespread confidence that they live in the woo capital of America that you see in every shop and restaurant you go to has a way of establishing a level of credibility for the town, as either this is a form of longstanding mass delusion whipped up into misplaced community pride, one of the greatest sustained populace-wide tourist scams in modern history, or there really is a little something to all this weird stuff and maybe all these happy people have a point.

If there was something to the unknown lights I saw, it was more evidence to add to my general thesis that this is a lot stranger and more complex than we think, and the commonly accepted notion of UFOs being either bullshit or all interstellar SUVs with little green men from other planets doesn’t totally fit what we can say we know about the subject. If you accept both infrared lights we all saw as anomalous, they each behaved differently, and neither were flying. If you accept the strobeless orange light in the sky as anomalous too, then that’s three very different characteristics exhibited by three different lights. The best evidence on UFOs just doesn’t quite fit into the human-focused boxes we set up for it. I don’t know what I saw in Sedona, I have a much better handle on what I felt, which according to them, seems to be the main point of everything in the end.