'It Can't Be a Drone': A Mérida Woman Films a Spinning White Point Crossing Venezuela's Sierra Nevada

MÉRIDA, Venezuela (Sept. 23, 2026): Beatriz León was sitting in the living room of her apartment in the Venezuelan city of Mérida at about 2:39 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026. From her seat, she says, the view looks straight out at the mountains.

“Just at that moment I see a white point go by that caught my attention because it stood out perfectly, despite the distance it was at, and I started recording,” she said, in remarks published by the Argentine newspaper Crónica on Sept. 29.

Her video was shared online by an account called Ovnis en Venezuela (“UFOs in Venezuela”). On Sept. 30, Coast to Coast AM picked it up.

✓ What we know

On the record: documents, statements, dates and places. Sources below.

• The time and place. According to Crónica, which cited a post by Héctor Escalante, who runs the Ovnis en Venezuela account, León filmed from Avenida Los Próceres in Mérida at about 2:39 p.m. local time (11:39 a.m. MST). She was looking toward Sierra Nevada National Park. Coast to Coast AM also places the sighting on the afternoon of Sept. 23, filmed from her home overlooking the park.
• The video. Crónica describes the footage as showing a bright point moving across the mountain landscape.
• The witness. León is named in both reports. She says she works with drones.
• The coverage. Crónica published the story at 4:06 p.m. Argentina time on Sept. 29, 2026 (12:06 p.m. MST). Coast to Coast AM followed on Sept. 30.
• The pictures. The photo at the top of Crónica’s article is captioned as an illustrative image (“Imagen ilustrativa”), not a frame from León’s video. Crónica separately ran a video capture labeled as such. Dead of Night Dispatch isn’t using either image.
• Limits. Neither report gives the object’s distance, size or altitude, and none of these can be measured from a phone video. Neither outlet reports any other witnesses or any official comment.

? What’s claimed

Accounts, testimony and theories, as told by the people who tell them.

The path. “It always moved in a linear way, from south to north, but at great speed,” León told Crónica. “In fact, it was going so fast that it crossed almost the whole sierra in two and a half minutes.”

The spin. “As it moved, the object rotated on its own axis,” she said. “I was able to confirm that later, when I reviewed the video.”

Not a balloon. “For me, it’s something strange,” León said. “I don’t think it was a balloon, because at that altitude the air currents are strong and it would have moved in a different way.”

Not a drone. “I don’t think it’s a drone either. I work with drones, and they don’t behave like that, unless it’s a little-known new model,” she told Crónica. Coast to Coast AM reported that she also cited the object’s apparent size, given how far away it was.

On the recording. In the video, Crónica reports, León can be heard talking to her family as she films: “I don’t know what that is, it can’t be a drone. How are we going to see a drone from here if you can’t even see a pigeon?”

A glow underneath. The account that shared the video also pointed out what it described as a kind of brightness or slight emanation on the underside of the object, according to Crónica.

What remains open

The two reports rest on one source: León’s video and her own account, passed on through the Ovnis en Venezuela post. Neither outlet offers an independent analysis of the footage or an alternative identification. The claims about speed, rotation and size are hers, and both outlets present them that way.

Coast to Coast AM ended its Sept. 30 report by asking its audience what they thought León had seen moving across the sky in front of the mountain.

As of that date, neither outlet had reported an identification. What exists is a white point, two and a half minutes and a witness who says that, whatever it was, it didn’t fly like anything she knows.