The unknown, seemingly slow and silently moving object, ‘looked like a blur with [the] naked eye,’ according to the Montana local who spotted it this June.

The blur only took on a more defined shape with the aid of the witness’s night vision camera, made by military contractor SiOnyx which also makes consumer models.

The unusual, long cylinder of light appears to slowly glide at an angle in front of an expansive starfield above ‘Big Sky Country’ — just before disappearing behind a mountain range visible from the witness’s location along Airport Road in Belgrade.

The sighting occurred less the four miles to the east of Montana’s Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport, also in Belgrade, although the eerie video contains no sounds of commercial air traffic as the UFO drifts across the starry night sky.

‘Sometimes we get videos like this that are baffling,’ said Alejandro Rojas, advisor to tech start-up Enigma Labs, whose UFO database received the witness’s submission.

‘It sort of looks like Starlink satellites,’ Rojas told DailyMail.com, ‘which look like a long train of satellites in a row. But these look like one solid object.’

Enigma has built a mᴀssive catalog of UFO incidents — now more technically known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) — to separate what is truly unusual in our skies from what is merely a trick of the eye.

In recent years, the term UAP has come into more common use to describe UFOs, as its more cautious framing presumes less about the events witnessed.

An aerial phenomena could be anything from airborne gases heated into a plasma, like the famous Northern Lights, to reflections off of ice crystals in a cloud, and on up to more exotic cases of actual, solid and sturdy objects, like a ‘flying’ alien craft.

The Montana witness spotted the UAP in the early hours of the morning on June 5, 2024, about ten minutes before 3am Mountain Time.

‘We love getting these videos out to the public for researchers to help us figure out,’ Rojas told DailyMail.com via email.

‘In some cases, they demonstrate a true mystery and help demonstrate why the Pentagon and NASA say they are taking UAP seriously,’ according to Rojas, who is now a founder and president of the new UAP research nonprofit UAP Discovery.

Enigma Labs, he noted, is now ‘getting hundreds of videos a week on our app, and although the vast majority turn out to be something mundane, at least a few turn out to be more difficult to explain.’

This Montana UAP sighting, Enigma case #294125, may prove to be related to a particular quirk of the hardware and software behind SiOnyx’s night vision, which the firm has delivered to the US Army as part of a roughly $20 million contract.

Some owners of one of SiOnyx’s consumer models, the SiOnyx Aurora Sport, have reported that it ‘doesn’t seem to handle high light contrast very well.’

‘If you have a well lit area and a darker area in the frame at the same time, either the lit area will be blown out or the dark area will be too dark to see clearly,’ as one member of the Reddit group r/NightVision noted in 2020.

The result this kind of ‘blown out’ contrast issue could lead to a train of glowing Starlink satellites, reflecting light from the sun, to look like one long, solid object.

It’s unclear which of the company’s night vision offerings was used by the witness, who reported their sighting to Enigma anonymously, but the UAP tracking start-up hopes to crowdsource the case for more clues from the public.

But across more than a century, cigar-shaped UAP have persisted as a perennial category in eyewitness reports.

In 1977, for example, 15 children in the Welsh village of Broad Haven — 14 boys and one girl — all reported to their teachers that they saw a curious silver, cigar-shaped aircraft in fields behind their school.

The incident, in which this object hovered over this tiny hamlet (population 856), is now the subject of a new four-part BBC documentary, Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens.

Like countless cigar-shaped UFOs dating back to late 1800s, when witnesses described them as ‘air ships,’ this case remains unsolved to this day.

In May, Enigma’s team revealed nine, highly unusual and never before seen videos taken of UFOs or UAP — including several cases of glowing, hazy UFO ‘orbs.’

Those videos, uploaded to Enigma’s database by citizen investigators in California, Arizona, Utah and Nevada, show UAP appearing out of nowhere without a sound and disappearing into thin air.

This week, Enigma shared one additional new video case with DailyMail.com: a June 8, 2024 sighting from Watford City, North Dakota taken just after midnight.

‘We were out camping and someone spotted a shooting star,’ the witness told Enigma in their submission.

But, the witness continued, ‘after taking a long look at it and discarding everything else that [it] could be,’ the campers all ultimately grew to be less sure it was a shooting star as the object appeared to hover in the night above them.

‘UAP are really a numbers game,’ Rojas pointed out.

‘If one out of a thousand turn out to be strange, collecting them en mᴀsse is the best way to get to the ones that are worth researching.’