Cylinder over Richmond, VA

The report, as filed

During a later-than-normal exercise walk I was prompted to notice a small, glowing, weird rod-shaped object hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground in the flimsy, leafy, outer branches of a large tree behind a house in my tranquil, heavily-wooded suburban neighborhood of Stratford Hills in Richmond, Virginia. I'm 54 years old and I've been walking this route nearly every day for ten years and what I beheld at 11:33 p.m. on a very quiet Sunday night was abnormal and totally out-of-place! Most of my neighbors probably were in bed. I was fortunate to view the mysterious glowing object that seemed to be hiding up in the tree and I partially attribute my good fortune to the fact that it was a new moon - the darknest night of the month! The silent UFO first was rod-shaped with a glowing blue light on the left end and a pinkish-violet light on the right end. It was hovering horizontally in a place where a human could not be. It was not a new-fangled bug zapper and there are no cable-TV or electric lines running near the tree and definitely not at that height. No logic for the uncanny faintly-glowing lights in the tree. So I stopped and shot video with my iPhone 4S but with no zoom in vid mode I switched to still-shot so I could peer closer. I took 30 pics spanning about ten minutes and during this time the small anomalous cylindrical UFO/entity? morphed into an orb which sometimes appeared cobalt-blue and other times violet with a freaky purplish core. Then it morphed back into a rod that was more white colored and appeared to be segmented, reminiscent of a bacterial rod under a microscope. This flying object ain't one of ours - NOT a drone, stealth bomber, planet Venus, or swamp gas. I did not hear any sounds coming from the object that night but later when I downloaded the video I was surprised to discover that my iPhone had picked up some intriguing clicking noises and when I showed the video to my neighbor S-- she said "It sounds like Morse code." Not meaning that it actually was Morse code but that it definitely sounded like some form of code and/or intelligently-contrived electronic signal. I stood motionless and alone on the shoulder of the street for approximately ten minutes, taking video and photos, before continuing my usual walking route home as I already was walking later than normal and did not want to be out after midnight. The small, glowing, cylinder-orb UFO/entity still was hovering up in the tree when I left the scene and I have no way of knowing how long it may have lingered behind my neighbor's house that night? So far, I have not shared this with the people who live in the house where the sighting took place because I did not want to run the risk of freaking them out, but coincidentally enough, they started leaving their back-porch floodlights on immediately in the wake of me seeing the UFO in their backyard. I did, however, tell one of their male neighbors and B----- agreed with me that maybe his neighbors who live in the house in question saw the object too and it spooked them? For the record, my neighbor's back-porch and backyard floodlights again were burning brightly when I passed during my walk tonight, 10-29-2014, before submitting this report to NUFORC. I've been watching for the UFO/entity ever since during my exercise walks but no encore yet, and I wasn't even going to submit a report because I didn't know whether this clicking, glowing, morphing rod/orb was an "alien/UFO" or spiritual entity, but then some other odd "occurrences" came to my attention that made me change my college-educated mind: 1. My sighting in Richmond was at 11:33 p.m. on August 24, 2014 and just four hours later at 3:30 a.m. on August 25, 2014 a motorist on I-295 N near the Hopewell exit, which is only 22 miles south of Richmond, was followed up the road by a bright UFO orb that was moving a lot faster than manmade highway traffic. Then the orb targeted another car in the southbound lanes and when the sphere made contact with the other vehicle both the orb and car vanished into thin air! Then the driver of the first car saw the orb reappear, and when it started following their car up the highway again they became "terrified," put the pedal to the metal, and made a hasty retreat off the next exit in sight. I learned of this fascinating occurrence at the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). 2. Then a few hours later around 9 a.m. on August 25, 2014, a seasoned colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve was killed when his F-15 fighter jet crashed under "mysterious circumstances" in the Blue Ridge Mountains west of Richmond near Deerfield, VA. Coincidentally enough, this was in an area where lots of residents have reported UFOs in the sky and orbs near the ground. They say it took two days to recover the colonel's body and the official Air Force story was that he was from Massachusetts on a "routine training mission." Synchronistically enough, I also heard NUFORC's esteemed Director Peter Davenport mention this odd fatal F-15 jet crash in Virginia's mountains during his Oct. 17, 2014 appearance on Coast-to-Coast AM radio with host George Noory. Keep up the good work Peter as the efforts of you and your associates are greatly appreciated by a world starving for accurate, thoughtful information and truth. I'm not going to speculate or draw conclusions, but it seems like an awful lot of high strangeness for such a small region in ten hours! Last but not least, a couple of weeks after my "close encounter" in Richmond, Virginia USA I was prompted to discover a seemingly-credible YouTube video of a small blue-pinkish-violet rod-shaped UFO that a man and woman in Ontario Canada videoed while sitting around a campground firepit and the anomalous silent hovering object looks uncannily similar to the UFO that I photographed in Richmond, VA when it was in "rod mode." The Ontario sighting was on August 20, 2014, only four days before my sighting in Virginia, and the Canadian couple was prompted to upload their video to YouTube on August 24 which synchronistically was the same day as my sighting! Upon request, I will gladly make my photos and video available to Director Peter Davenport and NUFORC. Ref: http://nuforc.org/webreports/112/S112877.html http://www.kait8.com/story/26383364/mass-f-15-fighter-jet-crashes-status-of-pilot-unknown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21D9jaxNwRc

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #114678). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.