Footage from the M62 near Brighouse, 11th April — anyone else see this?

Posting this partly to see if anyone else caught the same thing and partly because I've been staring at this clip for three weeks and I'd genuinely welcome some fresh eyes. On the night of the 11th of April, around 11:40pm, I was driving westbound on the M62 between junctions 25 and 24, just past Brighouse. Clear night, no rain, light traffic. My dashcam (a Vantrue N4, front and rear facing) picked up something that I noticed when I reviewed the footage the following morning.

In the front-facing footage, visible for approximately nine seconds, there's a light source at roughly 30 degrees elevation above the horizon, slightly to the north of my direction of travel. It appears to move in an arc - initially fairly slowly, then with a sharp directional change that takes it almost due east before it disappears from frame. No navigation lights that I can make out, no strobing, no visible shape beyond the light itself. It's significantly brighter than the other lights in the clip (motorway gantries, passing vehicles) but I appreciate that could be a camera exposure thing.

I've uploaded the relevant clip to the shared drive linked in my profile. It's thirty-seven seconds total, the object is visible from about the 4-second mark to the 13-second mark. I've also pulled three still frames which I'll attach below. I've done basic adjustments in Lightroom - brightness and contrast only, nothing that would affect the shape or trajectory - and I haven't applied any sharpening.

I am not saying this is anything other than something I can't immediately identify. It could be a drone, military aircraft, a helicopter on an unusual approach path to one of the nearby airfields. But the speed of that directional change doesn't sit right with me and I'd rather have more experienced people look at it than just sit on it.

Watched the clip twice. The directional change is the interesting bit - you're right that it's sharp. If that's real movement rather than a camera artefact (which the fact that it appears consistently across three frames suggests it is), then whatever it is covers a significant arc very quickly. Leeds Bradford Airport is not far from there but the approach paths don't typically go over that stretch of the M62. I'll have a look at FlightRadar24 archive data for that time and see if anything commercial or known was in the area.

The brightness differential could be camera exposure compensation reacting to the motorway gantry lighting rather than the object actually being that bright - the Vantrue N4 auto-exposure is quite aggressive in low light and can really blow out point light sources. Not saying it explains the movement, just worth noting when you're interpreting the frames.

That said, the trajectory looks odd even accounting for that. What's the frame rate the dashcam was running at? If it drops to 15fps in low light mode that could theoretically create a stutter effect that makes a gradual curve look like a sharp change, though I'd want to do the maths on that properly before claiming it.

Leeds Bradford Airport is not far from there but the approach paths don't typically go over that stretch of the M62

Checked the FlightRadar24 archive for 23:35 to 23:45 on the 11th April over that grid area. Nothing showing on there, but that's only registered transponder traffic obviously - military flights, drones under 250g, and anything without ADS-B won't appear. So absence of data isn't absence of aircraft.

I'm going to be the boring voice here and say that from the still frames alone it looks like it could reasonably be a Chinese lantern caught in upper-level wind. They go up slowly, drift, then when they catch a thermal or a higher wind current they can shift direction quite suddenly. The brightness and the lack of strobing are consistent with a lantern. I know it's a dull answer. I'm sorry.

I'm going to be the boring voice here and say that from the still frames alone it looks like it could reasonably be a Chinese lantern

I considered this. Genuinely. But in frame 3 the thing is moving roughly eastward and it's covering what looks like a large angular distance very quickly. A lantern being blown by wind doesn't accelerate like that in my experience - they sort of drift. Happy to be wrong if someone can show me a lantern doing that kind of angular speed change.

Sent you a message - I work with a group that does proper photogrammetric analysis on this kind of footage and we've got software that can do frame-by-frame velocity estimation if you know or can estimate the focal length and sensor size of the dashcam. It won't tell you what it is but it can give you a more precise figure for how fast the object was actually moving, which rules things in and out. No charge, we just ask to be credited if you ever write it up anywhere.

I was on the M62 that night, actually, though further east - I came off at junction 27 around quarter past eleven so probably missed this by about half an hour. Wish I'd been later. Clear night is right, I remember thinking the Pennines were unusually visible. No idea what you filmed but I'd rather have people like you posting with actual dashcam evidence and caveats than the blurry phone photos labelled 'GENUINE ALIEN CRAFT NO CGI' we used to get on here. Good post.