One of the passengers recorded a 30-second video of the 14 motionless orbs hovering in the still-light sky above the horizon as the sun was beginning to set.
“Look, nothing in the sky at all. Then, all of a sudden, bam. What is that?” William Guy asks in the video as he records the strange sight.
"Can anybody tell me what that is?" Guy asks on the video of the people around him.
No one had an answer.
"We're in the middle of the ocean on a ferry. Nothing around. No land, no nothing," he says.
A former Marine told WFLD-TV that when he was stationed at the Cherry Point Marine base about 125 miles away from where the video was filmed, powerful flares were dropped from planes during military exercises.
"They are 1 million candlepower each, so they were pretty bright and can be seen from far away and floated down slow as they hung from a parachute," Derrick Chennault said, according to WFLD.
Seymour Johnson Air Base is another military installation in the area about 70 miles from Cherry Point.
A base spokesman said military exercises are common in the area, but no aircraft from the base were near the ferry on Sept. 28, the day the video was filmed, WFLD reported.
It's still unclear exactly what the lights are or where they came from.
The video has been viewed more than 370,000 times.
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