The Cody Orbs Are Back, and Wyoming’s MUFON Chief Is Stumped

What happened

Cowboy State Daily reported in late September that a Cody man had watched “nearly two dozen mysterious lights” rise from Cedar Mountain, west of town, “every night from November to February.” The lights stopped, and he said they had come back: “Within the last two or three nights, I’m starting to see them again.” Wyoming’s Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) director reviewed the video and told the paper he had no explanation. MUFON is a volunteer group, not an official agency.

The footage

The video is “Mysterious lights over Cedar Mountain,” uploaded by Cowboy State Daily to YouTube on 26 September 2026. It is 43 seconds long and credited to the witness. It shows lights rising over the ridge at night. The sources give no per-second timestamps for specific events, so none are given here. The clip has no compass bearing, distance scale or simultaneous second angle. That means the lights’ size, distance and altitude are unknown from the video alone.

Timeline

• April 1991: Two drivers between Gillette and Wright report a huge silent light, an older Wyoming case the paper revisited.
• 2020: A Douglas family reports a nearly transparent object to NUFORC.
• November 2025 – February 2026: Nightly lights over Cedar Mountain, per the witness.
• About 22–24 September 2026: The lights return (“last two or three nights”).
• Wednesday, 23 September 2026: A second man reports five or six hovering lights near Medicine Wheel in the Bighorn Mountains.
• 25–26 September 2026: The Cowboy State Daily story runs, and the clip is uploaded.

What witnesses reported

The Cody resident: “They would float up and move toward each other. There were quite a few that basically followed the ridge line from left to right.” He says they changed direction and stopped, never matched a satellite tracker, and lacked aircraft lights. He also said this, which matters: “once they kicked off and they were doing their thing, the number of conventional aircraft would increase pretty dramatically as well.” He said he “had a little laser that I’d shine on them, and they would stop.” (Pointing a laser at any aircraft is a federal offense, according to the FAA.)

The Bighorn witness first thought of “drones ranchers use to monitor cattle,” and of hunters’ drones at the start of archery season. He rejected drones because “Small drones, they got maybe a 30-minute flight time… These things were up there for two-and-a-half, almost three hours.”

What the research found

The MUFON reasoning, verbatim. Richard Beckwith, Wyoming’s MUFON director, said the Cody clip “clearly depicts several disparate objects, all glowing white orbs, moving in different directions,” and that “They cannot be aircraft because they lack the navigation beacons required by FAA regulations. I am inclined to dismiss drones because most commercial drones exhibit similar lighting.” He concluded: “Right now, I have no explanation for the objects recorded in the video.” He judged the Bighorn footage to show no “novelistic movement, beyond the jiggling of the camera,” and said it might simply have been an airplane in the distance.