Light over Longview, WA

The report, as filed

I don’t know if what I saw is explainable or not, and I cannot find any news about it, but it was a strange phenomenon to me and I know I wasn’t the only one to see it. I was watching American Idol and during a commercial, I looked out my front window to see someone who had pulled their car over to the side of the road in front of my house. There isn’t any parking on that side of the street, but the car was left running and this person got out and pointed a camera to the sky and seemed to be taking pictures. I knew the full moon had come up in the direction he was pointing the camera, but I had been out looking at the moon several times earlier and I didn’t see anything really cool about it or unusual that would cause someone to pull over to the side of the road to take a picture of it. The more I watched this person, the more curious I became. What on earth was he taking pictures of? I put on my coat, walked out into the back yard where I knew I could see the moon, and got the surprise of my life. I don’t even know how to explain what I saw. It looked like three bright stars dancing around the moon. They had an orange-ish color to them. They almost looked like planets, like Mars perhaps. But these things seemed to be moving. I have to admit my first thought was that we were being attacked. I didn’t know if they were bombs coming in from overseas or what the heck they were. A million thoughts were passing through my brain at that point. Then I thought they had to be planets that just happened to get aligned up there near the moon, but they couldn’t have moved into that position that fast since I had just seen the moon less than an hour before that. Then it became obvious these lights or stars or whatever they were, were moving. In my back yard I had a limited view, but I knew from my front yard I would have a more expansive view of the sky, so I went around to the front of the house, but by then these lights had moved further away from me and the full moon. It was just a few seconds after I got to the front yard that they moved out of sight. It almost looked like they disappeared into clouds. Even though we have clear skies, it could be clouds had formed where the lights were headed. Clouds or not, that’s how it appeared to me when they disappeared. Almost like the moon peering in and out of the clouds when the clouds pass over it. Another reason for going to the front yard was to see if the person who was taking pictures knew what the lights were, but when the lights disappeared seconds after I reached the front yard, the person who had been taking pictures had gotten back into the car and had driven away, so I never got to speak to them. I’ve searched for news on this and I see that other orange lights have been spotted in the skies, but unlike what I’ve been reading, these lights were not low flying objects. Again, they looked like stars in the sky or planets, but really, really bright and moving. There were three of them when I saw them, but perhaps other lights had been there and had disappeared by the time I got curious enough to go outside. I didn’t see any objects, just light. They were moving together, but appeared to be separate as the distance between the lights varied as they moved. These lights were right beside a full moon so there was plenty of light in the sky to see an object, but I saw no objects, just bright stars or planets that moved in a strange fashion and then disappeared. Maybe there is a simple explanation, and if so, I apologize for bothering you. But I have lived on this earth a long time, and I’ve spent a lot of time outdoors looking at the sky, and I have never seen anything like this. I’ve even lived under a flight path for a major airport and I have watched planes flying at night as they come in to land or take off, but at the same time I could also see planes higher in the sky that would be passing over this airport, obviously not taking off or landing there, but just passing over as they journey to whatever other airport they are going to. The point is, I’ve seen planes in the skies at night, both low flying and high flying, and these lights were not like any I’ve ever seen on aircraft I’m familiar with.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #117585). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.