Right so I've been down this rabbit hole for the past few days and the timing really is hard to dismiss. The TFR that appeared over the Dugway Proving Ground area wasn't a standard one either - it was classified under a restriction type that doesn't show up in the usual NOTAM explanations they give the public.
What gets me is that these restrictions typically go up before a known test, not reactively. If the lights were just some mundane explanation, why would you need to lock down airspace after the fact? That suggests something unexpected happened that they then needed to contain or at least prevent documentation of from above.
I do want to be careful not to just assume military = cover-up, because Dugway is genuinely one of the most active test sites in the US and weird stuff happens there routinely with perfectly boring explanations. But the correlation here is tighter than usual.
Has anyone managed to pull the actual NOTAM reference numbers from that week? Would be worth cross-referencing with any ADS-B data that was logged before the restriction kicked in.
