On November 9, 2018, commercial pilots flying for British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, and a Norwegian carrier reported very bright, fast-moving objects passing their aircraft off the southwest coast of Ireland. Shannon Air Traffic Control confirmed nothing showed on military radar, and the Irish Aviation Authority opened a formal investigation under its confidential occurrence reporting process.

The first pilot, on a British Airways flight from Montreal to Heathrow, reported an object overtaking the aircraft at very high speed at FL360 northwest of Cork. Two subsequent crews corroborated similar observations within minutes. The IAA's preliminary conclusion, reported in mainstream press, leaned toward meteors but was explicitly not definitive; the underlying occurrence report remains catalogued under the IAA's confidential filing process rather than published.