Fireball over Providence, RI

The report, as filed

My wife and I were walking along the Providence river on South Water Street on the 27th after attending Waterfire in the city. We were approximately 100-150 yards away from the bridge where the Waterfire festival ends, near the pavilion next to the river that marks the place where the Gaspee was burned by RI colonists in the early 1770s. I looked up and noticed a large commercial airliner flying overhead, perhaps approaching TF Green airport in Warwick which was flying fairly low, but that quickly disappeared over the bay and we continued on our walk. As we were walking north towards the bridge, a group of three younger guys were walking towards us and one said “What is that? UFOs?” The other guys laughed, but we turned our heads and saw 3 bright orange lights in the sky in a triangular pattern…approx 100-150m high (but could be higher…hard to tell). They made no noise and as we watched another guy (older who was walking his dog) came along behind us and saw we were looking at something and looked up and said something like “What the heck is that?” We said we had no idea. Slowly, the color faded from bright orange, almost flamelike to white and the first two dots continued down the river towards the harbor/Narraganset Bay while one stayed suspended for a minute or to (I took a quick video with my iPhone of that one) and then it slowly faded away. I wanted to blame the appearance on Waterfire, thinking that perhaps they were large embers suspended in the sky but there was no major breeze that would blow these downriver 100-150 yards and they all turned white at the same time. Finally the one light in the sky faded out and we turned and walked away. This was the 3rd UFO I’ve seen in my life BTW….but was very strange as it was seen in such a cosmopolitan area, by so many people (the young college aged guys, the dog walker and us), but we were literally only 300-450 feet away from hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #114127). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.