Sommer Chase’s recent videos of three lights rotating in a triangular pattern over Gillette have racked up hundreds of thousands of views on social media. But Chase told Cowboy State Daily she’s been seeing strange lights long before she started capturing them on video.
“I tried catching them on my old camera phones, and I couldn’t get them,” Chase said. “They move all around the sky, up and down.”
Her sightings stretch back to her childhood on a North Dakota farm, long before anyone carried a camera in their pocket.
Chase said she is certain she isn’t hallucinating and believes the lights she sees aren’t satellites or drones. To her, the most reasonable explanation is that humans are not alone in the universe.
“I honestly believe they’ve been living amongst us for a long time,” Chase said. “It doesn’t scare me.”
‘They’re Everywhere’
Chase is certainly not alone in that belief.
After an initial release of previously classified government UFO files in May, a CBS News/YouGov poll published in June revealed that 63% of Americans believe intelligent life exists on other planets, with 21% saying contact has already happened and another 46% believing it will happen in the future.
Rather than triggering mass panic, 67% of Americans reported that meeting beings from another world would leave them feeling “curious.”
That shifting mood follows years of declassified military footage, congressional hearings and mainstream media coverage that have moved UFOs, now more formally called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), out of tinfoil-hat territory and into serious discussion.
Chase said that the stigmatization of the past, where experiencers would be demonized or accused of lying, is what kept her from sharing videos of the strange lights when she started recording them.
“I was like, ‘If I post about these, no one’s going to believe it,’” Chase said. “I waited until last year. Even then I said, ‘Should we post about them?’”
When she finally posted, her first video quickly amassed more than 200,000 views.
Scrolling through the replies, Chase found that instead of encountering the skepticism for which she had braced, she was met with familiarity from viewers who had also seen them.
"They're saying that they see them all over, from the Netherlands to Australia, Texas, Pennsylvania,” Chase said. “They're everywhere. You just have to be there at the right time.”
‘The Lights Are Out’
Chase’s earliest encounters came as a child in rural North Dakota, where she remembers a strange light trailing her grandmother’s car through the fog on an early-morning drive.
“My grandma was driving at 6 in the morning,” Chase said. “There was a light following behind us. Kind of like a car, but it was just the light. And then all of a sudden, the light just disappeared, and she just went on her way.”
She also remembers riding in her dad’s truck as a young girl when he suddenly stopped and started shouting that he had seen a UFO.
The sightings went quiet for most of her adult life, until they returned in Colstrip, Montana, where her husband, Cody Chase, was working night shift at the Westmoreland coal mine.
“He would call me in the middle of the night, and he would say the lights are out,” Chase said. “Sometimes he would see a lot of them. Sometimes just a couple.”
His sightings started in 2019. In 2022, Chase said she finally saw them herself.
“In Montana, they could be from anywhere from 1 am to 3 a.m., and they could be there for a while,” Chase said.
In June, the couple and their two kids moved to Gillette, where Cody Chase still works as a coal miner.
But she said the sightings did not end in Montana. Chase said she started seeing them again on evening walks in her new town.
“We always go to Sunflower School, we just started watching them there,” Chase said. “That’s where you can see them really well.”
‘No Explanation’
The lights don’t travel like satellites, Chase said, nor do they carry the telltale hum of a drone.
Richard Beckwith, a former Rock Springs attorney who serves as Wyoming state director for the Mutual UFO Network, reviewed her footage and reached a similar conclusion.
“I must agree that the objects are very interesting, and I have no explanation at present for what the user recorded,” Beckwith told Cowboy State Daily in a text.
Still, he cautioned against jumping to conclusions.
“Remember, though, that because we can’t explain it today, doesn’t mean we won’t be able to explain it in the future,” Beckwith said. “For now, these objects are unidentified.”
Whatever they are, Chase said the lights have never frightened her, and neither has the idea that non-human intelligence could be crossing paths with human life.
“If they really wanted to hurt us or kill us or anything, they would have done it already a long time ago,” Chase said.
Chase said she has considered that the lights could be classified or experimental government or military technology. But if they’re not, she wonders whether non-human life is keeping watch over humanity’s largest energy developments to make sure people don’t destroy a planet that other beings might call home, too.
“Maybe this is their Earth and we just live on it,” Chase said. “They’re not going to allow us to destroy their home.”
Not the First
Chase’s videos add to a long list of unexplained sightings across Wyoming.
Earlier this year, a Cody man filmed nearly two dozen glowing orbs rising over Cedar Mountain, footage that Beckwith said he could not explain.
In Sweetwater County, the sheriff’s office has watched drone-like objects gather for more than a year over the Red Desert and the Jim Bridger Power Plant and now considers them the “new normal.”
Some encounters stretch back decades. In 1991, a Cheyenne attorney and his father, a former Wyoming attorney general, were driving from Gillette toward Wright when a massive, silent craft hovered over their car and lit the highway like noon.
They kept it to themselves for years, worried people would think they had lost their minds.
A Wind River Indian Reservation hunter said a silent black triangle passed over him twice in the Wind River Range in 2003, a sighting that echoes reports in newly declassified federal files.
In 2020, a Douglas family reported a nearly transparent object that kept changing direction for 45 minutes.
By Beckwith’s count, 5% to 10% of sightings are never explained, and for now he puts Chase’s footage in that group.
Emma Jane Jackson can be reached at emma@cowboystatedaily.com.
