Patagonia's Mysterious Lights: When a Trail Cam Photobombed the Entire Internet

Bon Blossman
Sep 17
5 min read

If you’ve ever scrolled past night-vision wildlife clips—foxes trotting by, deer blinking like they owe you money—you know camera traps are the quiet introverts of science. They sit in the dark, do their job, and never ask for clout. But one unit in the far south of Chile decided to have main character energy and snapped something so bizarre that researchers are still side-eyeing reality.

Map zoom highlighting southern Chile’s Magallanes region where a camera trap recorded mysterious lights. — Remote enough to ghost your phone: the Public Baseline camera trap site in Patagonia.

On January 21 at 12:22 a.m., a camera trap from the University of Magallanes’ Public Baseline project, placed in a remote Patagonian meadow, captured three photos in two seconds of intense, descending lights. No cars. No nearby roads. No lightning storms. Just a silent meadow and what looks like glowing orbs sprinting out of the sky to say “boo” to a lens. Across roughly 365,000 photos and clips in the project, nothing like this had ever appeared before. That’s why the team went public: they’re stumped, and they want help solving it.

So what exactly showed up?

Pretty cool video that shows the lights. WTH.

In the first image, the lights look distant; in the next frames, they appear closer and brighter, almost as if they’re moving down toward the camera. One technical analysis even suggested that if the lights were far away and airborne, their apparent motion would imply serious speed—though that “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The site’s isolation and the absence of storms rule out most of the usual suspects you’d throw at weird sky glow.

Trail camera mounted at the edge of a Patagonian meadow at night. — Built for pumas, surprised by plasma? The quiet worker that captured the lights.

The theory smackdown (friendly edition) of the mysterious lights

1) It’s just an insect, breh.

One camp argues a spider or moth might’ve triggered the sensor. That’s not wild; trail cams capture close-up bugs all the time, and reflective wings can look like streaks. But the team notes these cameras are designed to avoid constant false positives from insects, and even if a bug caused the trigger, that doesn’t by itself explain the luminous blob-like forms marching through successive frames. In other words: a moth might have rung the doorbell, but that doesn’t explain who walked through the door.

2) Lens flare or reflections?

Another standard explanation is internal reflections in the lens—especially with bright point sources. Yet the device is trained on a flat horizon in a sparsely lit area, and there aren’t obvious external lights nearby to bounce around inside the optics. It’s still possible, but the conditions make it a weaker fit.

3) Ball lightning or plasmoids?

This is the high-concept sci-nerd option. Ball lightning is a rare, still-poorly-understood electrical phenomenon often reported during thunderstorms: glowing spheres that drift or dart for seconds before vanishing. In lab and field studies, similar structures called plasmoids—coherent glowing plasma blobs guided by magnetic fields—have been produced and observed. The problem: Patagonia that night was calm and storm-free, and ball lightning is usually a thunderstorm groupie. Still, some researchers note that exotic plasmoid-like effects can occur under special, localized conditions without a typical storm setup. Verdict: intriguing, not proven.

4) The “Hessdalen cousin” idea

If you’re a connoisseur of mystery lights, you’ve heard of Hessdalen, a valley in Norway famous for sporadic luminous orbs studied for decades with cameras, magnetometers, and spectrometers. Some observers see the Patagonia event as “Hessdalen vibes”—brief, bright, oddly moving lights with no easy cause. It’s not evidence, but it is a reminder that “lights without a neat explanation” isn’t a brand-new genre.

Why this case hits different

First, the context. Most “weird light” stories are eyewitness tales: dramatic, but messy. This one comes from a wildlife camera network run by a university, designed to gather systematic data over time. That adds credibility—and timestamps. Second, the dataset is massive (hundreds of thousands of files) and the anomaly shows up exactly once. In research, “once” is both exciting and annoying: exciting because it’s rare; annoying because you can’t replicate it (yet). Third, the location removes a bunch of human-made noise—no roads, no obvious light sources—so hypotheses have to work harder.

Three-panel illustration of descending lights captured by a trail camera in Patagonia. — Three frames. Two seconds. Infinite theories. (Artist depiction.)

Okay, but what could make lights like that?

Let’s speed-run the physics in human English.

Plasma 101:
- Plasma is ionized gas—think neon signs, lightning, the Sun. Under certain conditions, plasma can form self-contained blobs (plasmoids) that glow, move, and even persist briefly as the surrounding magnetic and electric fields “bottle” them up. Lab work has filmed plasmoids forming, evolving, and fading, with telltale temperatures and spectral signatures. The world has not agreed on a single, universal recipe for naturally occurring plasmoids, but the ingredients list often includes localized ionization, electromagnetic disturbances, and conductive environments (metal ions, dust, etc.).
Close-up objects faking “sky speed”:
- This is the classic “bug near the lens looks like a UFO” problem. A tiny, fast, reflective object inches from the lens can streak dramatically and seem huge if you assume it’s far away. The Patagonia frames complicate this because the lights look like they approach in sequence—not impossible for a nearby object, but the brightness and geometry aren’t textbook insect artifacts either. The project’s engineers also tune their systems specifically to reduce this kind of false trigger.

Culture meets science (because of course it does)

Local folklore among the Mapuche people includes tales of ominous “bad lights,” adding a cultural lens to the phenomenon—pun intended. Meanwhile, UFO and UAP groups are—predictably—very interested. The university team isn’t jumping to extraterrestrials; they’re taking the “document first, theorize carefully” route and expanding monitoring to catch the lights again with more sensors and angles. That’s the grown-up move: more data, less vibes.

What happens next?

Best case, the same area lights up again. This time, multiple cameras catch it from different angles, and maybe a magnetometer or spectrometer logs a signature. If the light is a plasma structure, we might see distinct spectral lines (fingerprints of glowing atoms) and magnetic disturbances. If it’s a close object like an insect or a drifting fiber, stereo views should expose the shallow depth and small size instantly. If it’s a lens artifact, a repeat under similar conditions will help pin down the optical path. Any of those still beats arguing in the comments.

Until then, the Patagonia lights are the science equivalent of a perfect cliffhanger: just enough footage to obsess over, not enough to close the case.

And that’s why this story bangs—because it’s not just another “I saw something!” moment. It’s a measured anomaly in a professional dataset, in a location that filters out a ton of boring explanations. Whether it’s plasma doing parkour or a rare optical goof, we’ll learn something interesting by chasing it.

TL;DR, but make it sparkly

A remote trail cam in Patagonia snapped three frames in two seconds of bright descending lights—no storms, no nearby roads. One-of-a-kind in ~365,000 files.
Theories: insect trigger (possible but incomplete), lens reflections (less likely in context), plasmoids / ball lightning (tempting, but storm-free night complicates it).
Researchers are expanding monitoring to catch a repeat with more instruments. If it returns, we’ll finally get receipts.