Fireball over New York City (Brooklyn), NY

The report, as filed

At 12:10am on June 30th, 2014, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY, my wife and I went out on our patio for a cigarette. I went out before her, lit my smoke and from the top of the stairs to our patio, my wife asked asked, “What are those? They aren’t planes.” I looked up to where she was pointing to the SSW. There were two orangish orbs that were flickering slightly. The first thought I had was that they were Chinese Lanterns. However, the hair on the back of my neck stood up as I realized that they were moving towards us and, far too fast to be any sort of lantern or balloon. The objects appeared to be at 2,000 - 3,000 feet in altitude, moving at 200-300 miles per hour. The two objects traveled silently and in apparent formation, perhaps 2,500 feet apart. They traveled at a constant rate and did not change bearing. As the objects approached, not quite overhead, but maybe offset by about 15-degrees from directly overhead, I noticed that the glowing, flickering orange nearly disappeared and I was able to observe the underside of the objects, which appeared round in shape with a dark center and a ring of somewhat dim, fuzzy light around it. The two objects disappeared behind our building. I considering running through the front of the apartment to see if I could observe the objects on the other side of the building. My wife ran inside to grab her camera. She returned just as a third orb appeared and followed a similar vector to the other two objects. Again, as the third object passed nearly overhead, I observed the same structure as the first two objects. My wife was able to get one very nondescript, streaked image with her camera but honestly, it doesn’t look like much. The entire incident lasted perhaps 30-40 seconds. After the three objects had passed, my wife and I were somewhat shaken and tried to make any sense of what we had just seen. They clearly were not any sort of aircraft or drone that I have seen (and I consider myself an aircraft aficionado along with being a drone and R/C aircraft pilot). The other thought I had were that perhaps they were some sort of debris entering the atmosphere and burning up, but that would not account for what appeared to be a level flight path. About a minute or so after this, a commercial aircraft crossed the flight path of the objects at a perpendicular angle, heading east. I have no idea if the pilot of that airliner, likely landing at JFK, was able to see what had just occurred, but I suppose we have no way of knowing. We checked the internet for any other reports of this incident and found nothing, which is astonishing considering it occurred over New York City. However, we found Nuforc and filed this report in hopes of anyone else coming out and reporting this.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #110783). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.