Strange object does “J” type movement and disappears behind clouds on thermal.

As the title says.

I was in the middle of nowhere (central idaho) elk hunting this last season and during the evening decided to star gaze with my night vision (gen 3 PVS/14-31)

After about an hour of that and seeing countless shooting stars/satellites I decided it would be fun to break out my thermal and scan around for animals in the fields below me. After discovering no animals I decided to look up at the sky for a while (usually I wouldn’t do this as the sky under thermal imaging is pretty lame. You can see clouds but that’s about it and you get bored quickly. Looking at the stars though actual night vision is 10x more fun)

Anyways, I started seeing a lot (dozens over a period of about an hour and a half) of weird objects going what appeared to be horizon to horizon in roughly 5-10 seconds depending on the particular object. I was intrigued as it was 37 degrees out (no bugs flying) and birds or bats don’t move that quickly.

I was having a hard time gauging the distance of these objects with my thermal as it does not have a range finder built into this particular model and looking at a single digital screen and judging distance without features behind the object is very very hard. I thought they were at least several thousand feet in the air but I couldn’t confirm this…

Until.

One of the objects came to a immediate and complete stop. I observed it motionless (I mean completely still) for approximately 7 seconds. The object then did what I can only really describe as “jiggle” in the sky. Upon seeing this I realized I wasn’t recording so I started recording on my thermal. As soon as I hit record the object did a hard “J” type maneuver and dipped behind the clouds. After a moment it reappears from behind the clouds before finally disappearing for good.

Earlier in the day I had been on top of the mountains (now 1400 feet above me) and the same type of clouds were still thousands of feet above my head.

I say this because my particular thermal (an Iray RL25) only has a detection range on a living creature. And at that range it needs to be like a cow or a horse or something big in order to see. However I can observe passenger planes at altitude because they put off crazy amounts of heat.

I know my thermal could NOT see a bird or any other creature from the distance the clouds were from me.

All of these objects were invisible to the naked eye AND my gen3 night vision. You could only see them under thermal.

Anyways here’s the short thermal video.