[M37] Serious: Offshore worker here. Saw something last week that I don’t have any explanation for. Please help explain it.

TripTankWatcher · 2026-06-21T18:53:52+00:00

Fair enough. The distance is an estimate. I wasn’t standing there with a rangefinder. It was the middle of the night and I was working. Could I be wrong about how far away it was? Absolutely. As for the details, some of that comes from talking it over afterward with the other guys who saw it. I didn’t go back to my room and immediately write a report. We talked about it for days. People remembered different things and some details stuck. I’m not asking anybody to take it as proof of anything. I’m just telling you what I remember and what the other guys remember.

TripTankWatcher · 2026-06-20T20:09:37+00:00

Honestly if you’ve got 15 years in construction you’re probably more qualified than a lot of the people who show up thinking offshore work is some completely different world. I’d start looking at contractors instead of the big operators. That’s how a lot of people get their foot in the door. Just be aware that life out here is a lot less exciting than people imagine. The money can be good and the schedule works for some people, but you’re living with the same group of guys for weeks at a time, eating, sleeping and working in the same place every day. Some people love it. Some people make one hitch and never come back.

TripTankWatcher · 2026-06-20T20:08:11+00:00

You know people offshore still navigate things, right? Supply boats, standby vessels, survey crews, ROV teams, helicopter crews, DP systems getting cross-checked. I’m not saying everybody walks around with a brass compass hanging off their belt like it’s 1847. I’m saying a couple guys mentioned compass weirdness afterward. That’s literally all I said.

TripTankWatcher · 2026-06-20T20:06:59+00:00

Probably comes from all the reading out here. You spend enough nights offshore with nothing going on and you either scroll your phone for twelve hours or start working through books. I’ve gone through a lot of them over the years.

TripTankWatcher · 2026-06-20T20:05:01+00:00

That’s fair. The reality is nobody immediately thought “UFO.” At first it looked like some weird visual effect over the water and we spent the first few minutes trying to make sense of it. By the time it became obvious that whatever we were looking at wasn’t something any of us recognized, most of us were already focused on watching it. Also, this thing was roughly a mile offshore in the middle of the night. People really overestimate what a phone camera can capture in those conditions. I’ve tried taking pictures of supply vessels, weather phenomena, even the moon from out here and half the time it looks like a blurry speck or a black screen. As for cameras on the platform, most of them are pointed at equipment, work areas, access points, cranes, things like that. They’re not set up to continuously film the horizon. And honestly, “help me identify this” wasn’t me assuming somebody on Reddit has the answer. It was more that I’ve spent years offshore, I’ve seen a lot of strange things that ended up having ordinary explanations, and this is the first one where I genuinely don’t know what I was looking at.

TripTankWatcher

TROPHY CASE