Unknown over Portland, OR

The report, as filed

On November 23, 2014, at 6:20 pm I believe I saw an unidentified flying object. My room is seperate from the house. To get into the house I have to walk up the back deck leading to the back door of the house. So, on my way into the house from my room I looked up into a pretty dark sky. Cloudy. There directly northward were 3 lights. Pretty big lights. The shape was indescribable from the distance. I examined them as closely as I could. They had my attention because the more I looked the more I realized that these are not the airplane or helicopter lights that are commonly seen at night in my SE Portland area near the Sellwood Bridge. (Which by the way is currently under construction.) On any night one would have no problem spotting airplanes coming from the south. More common than ones coming from the north. I've seen as many as 4 helicopters hovering over the city at one time late at night from 11pm and on. Anyways, there I stood on the deck right outside th! e back door looking at these 3 lights that I noticed moved around very strangely in ways you could not expect from conventional aircraft. Side to side. Down, up and in circles. While it was hard to see the shape I could see they were orange and red in color. And sometimes just white. As 2 of the lights slowly began to fade away, 2 more extra bright lights slowly began to appear from the horizon. They moved higher and higher. The first 3 had some manner of formation but were definitely independent of each other. The 2 new bright lights came in formation but then split up as they got closer to the rest. For a short time all 5 were together before 2 of what I believe were the first set of 3 faded away out of sight. The 3 remaining did a slow dance. Unpredictable in nature. And offbeat. At least 2 or 3 more times I saw 1 or 2 fade away and another 1 or 2 appear to rise from the horizon. There were too many objects in my vision down lower for me to see where they may be coming from but if I were to guess I would say at least 5 or 6 miles aw! ay. Probably more, not sure. I shot some shaky video. They only appear to be dots of light on camera. But, I asked my mother to come look and she watched them for at least a couple minutes. The entire spectacle lasted about 10 minutes but who knows how long they had been there before I noticed them. The airport is about 15 miles northeast of where I live. East of where I saw these UFOs. I live about 15 blocks from the river. After doing a quick search my mother discovered that there was a UFO sighting earlier the same day in Paris, France. Sort of similar to what I saw. I feel like there is more details I should be giving but I'm forgetting. I called my brother who lives within 2 miles away to look up and see it. His girlfriend answered the phone and as I was giving my reason for calling they started to fade away. When I got off the phone they made at least one more brief appearance before disappearing for the last time. I guess that's all for now. I'm working on getting a hold of l! ocal news. ((name deleted))

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #115623). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.