Other over Boulder, CO
A witness account on file, unevaluated. Most of the archive rests here, and honestly so.
The report, as filed
Loud Noise Along with UFO flashing lights aircraft.
Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center. Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.
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What would the paper say?
For a dated, located U.S. sighting, FAA radar data and ATC communications are the records most likely to exist. Through Aletheca, the house instrument, anyone can commission the request — filed, chased, and published in the open, refusals included. The draft goes over already written: the records sought, and the date window they would live in.
Routed to: Federal Aviation Administration · records window 2014-03-08 → 2014-03-25
From the same sky
Related entries
September 30, 2023 · 3:18 AM · SPHERE
Boulder, CO
Thought I saw one take off really quick. Didn’t seem like ‘warp’ speed could have been drone fast.
September 7, 2023 · 10:15 AM · CIRCLE
Boulder, CO
I saw this bright round thing this morning at 10:15am MST in the Western sky next to the moon image. I thought it was a planet, but it started moving (see video). You can see a tail on it with a smaller bright circle at the end. It was traveling West to East.
August 27, 2023 · 3:48 AM · LIGHT
Boulder, CO
I woke up to check the building my boyfriend owns and instead saw an intensely bright light move from left to right on the horizon. It lasted 10 or 15 seconds and went in a very straight line. It did not look like a shooting star it was too straight. There was an odd muffled sound and almost a vibration after and I woke up my boyfriend out of shock but it was over.
May 19, 2023 · 7:58 PM · TRIANGLE
Boulder, CO
I was parked near the church at lookout road and 79th getting sunset photos. I looked east of my location. I saw a black shape I initially thought was a bird. I pointed my 500mm lens at it and got multiple photos. It looked like it has a cone shaped balloon at the top of the object. The cone was grey and had a black tip facing upward It had 4 round gray shapes hanging below the cone shape. I think something was tethered at the bottom of the round shapes by a single strap. It looked like it was floating north of my position [NUFORC annotation: Balloon - Possible]
May 9, 2023 · 1:17 PM · TRIANGLE
Boulder, CO
Was Taking Photos with an old Kodak camera, The exposure wasn't right, and the glare and blur is noticeable. Large Triangle ship moves across the sky at around a relative speed of 50-60 MPH. Large gaps were visible on the ship, and it was such a spectacle to observe.
April 12, 2023 · 1:20 AM · UNKNOWN
Boulder, CO
Night of Tuesday 4/11, early morning Wednesday 4/12 (Clear night after the first very warm day of the spring here. Very little cloud cover; clear enough that several stars were visible throughout the night. I have tall windows and can see a great deal of open sky, looking north mostly across a large parking lot, with my view of the sky blocked only by one other building, a few trees, and the foothills off to the west.) At approximately 1:20am, while seated at my desk in front of my north-facing, third-floor window in North Boulder, a bright spot of white light caught my eye. Fairly high in the sky, it lasted for about five seconds before moving straight horizontally to the right (a short distance from my vantage point), with the light dissipating as it moved until it faded out completely within the span of about a second. Light was much brighter than any other object in the sky at the time. (Throughout the night, small planes were visible periodically.) Very hard to discern distance. Roughly 10 minutes later, I saw the same thing again, lower down in the sky. Similarly bright, it repeated the pattern, staying stationary for a moment and then fading out quickly as it began to move horizontally (this time to the left). Like the first time, this was so brief that I didn’t have time to try to capture any images or video. Another ~10 minutes later, this happened a third time, even lower down (barely above the line of trees and buildings across the long parking lot I face out of my window). Same level of brightness, still impossible to discern distance. This time it disappeared to the right and my line of sight was broken by trees and buildings. Unlike the previous times, a few seconds after it disappeared I clocked another source of light that seemed to have just appeared. This was the next phase: 1:42am: A faint but distinct light was apparent on the right side of my field of view, much dimmer than the previous three lights, roughly as bright as a star in my perception. I immediately noticed that it was moving upwards and to the right, relatively slowly. My first thought was that it was an airplane, but it was an unblinking white light so this seemed unlikely. My next thought was either a helicopter or a drone, until about five-ten seconds into my observation of its flight, at which point it took a sudden, V-shaped turn back down and to the left. My hackles were already raised from the oddness of the previous lights but this motion struck me as very unusual and I was a little alarmed. (I have a time stamp for this moment because I attempted to take a video of the sky but had no luck; there’s some light pollution from the neighboring buildings and parking lots and my iPhone SE struggled to capture anything as dim as this light.) The object continued to move over a fairly large area of the sky, still staying to the right end of my view (thus north-northeast from me), for approximately the next 10 minutes. Its motion varied considerably and struck me as odd at several different times, alternating between different kinds of patterns: - It would move slowly, straight in one direction or arcing slightly, coming to a stop occasionally - It would move in a way that reminded me of an insect, which is to say flying in meandering, looping motions, or bobbing up and down. Sometimes the loops were tight and fast, sometimes slower and stretched out over more space - It would move in more jagged patterns that reminded me of the way you might play with a laser pointer or scribble to test a pen: fast swooping motions alternating with turns on tight, acute angles as it switched directions, albeit performed much more slowly. Turns were often very acute and seemed to take no effort at all; it seemed to be able to switch direction more or less instantaneously with no concern for momentum - It would move in fits and starts, moving jerkily, quickly and then slowly, between stops - It would make repeated “bouncing” movements, either moving quickly right and left or up and down ~2:00am: After nearly 20 minutes of this unusual movement, the object took a swooping turn and started moving left (west). This started at a normal speed (relative to what I'd observed), and then it accelerated over the course of about a second before moving extremely quickly off to the left and out of my line of sight. I cannot overemphasize the speed that I’m talking about - until this point, it still seemed plausible to me that this might be a commercial drone despite the odd angles of its movement, but this was unbelievably fast - it shot off at a speed that no drone I’m familiar with could plausibly hit, let alone that quickly. This was so unusual that I had a strong visceral reaction to it. 2:02am: I quickly scanned the sky once it disappeared out of view and almost immediately took notice of another object in a slightly different part of the sky (higher up and due north from me rather than north-northeast) - it was of identical brightness to the previous object as far as I could discern and it occurred to me that it was likely the same object, but there’s no way to say for certain. (I have a precise time stamp here because I began to record another video, also fruitless visually, but in which I narrate back the events of the past hour, which has helped me put together a timeline.) About thirty seconds into my observation, an extremely bright object flashed through the sky, to the left of this object, going north - this looked instinctively like a shooting star, which it may have been, but it appeared significantly lower and closer than shooting stars I’ve seen previously in the area. I perceived red/blue light around it in the brief moment I could see it. The main object was still there, and this began a very long phase in which it stayed there until the sun came up. To reiterate before this next phase: I proceeded to observe this object (which may or may not have been the same one that zoomed off) from at least 2:02am until roughly 5:40am, unbroken except for my occasional, hasty trips to the bathroom or for more water. It was in the same area of the sky, moving on a smaller scale than the object I'd seen previously, for at least three and a half hours. 2:03am - 5:05am: I’m going to summarize the events of these few hours with highlights but without precise time stamps; at some point I stopped recording videos, having had no luck, and stopped recording voice memos as what I was observing became somewhat repetitive (with notable exceptions). For the entirety of this chunk of time, the object moved in the same assortment of patterns that I’ve described above from the previous (possibly same) object: swooping turns; tight, angular turns; tight loops; bouncing back and forth or up and down. This covered a smaller area of the sky - it’s impossible to say if it was covering similar distances and was simply further away, as the brightness appeared to be the same but I have no frame of reference for the distance. Notable things in this period: - At one point there were two other, brighter objects visible towards the bottom right of my field of view. These were not quite as bright as the lights I saw at the beginning of the night but were closer to the brightness of those than to the relative dimness of the main object I was tracking. I did not see these move erratically so it’s entirely possible that these were in fact drones or something mundane, but their brightness struck me as unusual. One light reappeared multiple times and then a second appeared with it on one occasion, the two of them moving seemingly at the same speed and in parallel locked trajectories until they left my FOV. At another point I did perceive another object of similar brightness and type of movement to the main object, further to the left of my FOV (north-northwest), which moved across the sky to the right of the main object before I lost track of it visually. (I am more confident of the oddness of this object than of the brighte