Sphere over Las Vegas, NV

The report, as filed

July 4th Sighting Over Las Vegas 2015 Las Vegas Sighting _ July 4th 2015_ 9 P. M. On a night when you'd expect to see an array of lights, my family / group and I never expected to see what we saw over the trees to the southeast of our driveway. Seven of us, my wife, two daughters and three of their friends, all grown, were over and enjoyed the 4th's activities, when at 9 P.M. we went outside to watch the fireworks. I noticed one of our company looking into the nighttime sky to the southeast, when I looked up and saw a lit up object that seemed to be something other then fireworks. It was just hovering bright and blue-green in color at first, then it moved ever so slowly and I thought it was a helicopter, meanwhile it had all of our attention by now, except my wife who went inside for something. It was then that the airborne craft started to move and made a sudden turn and as it did it began to fade and reappear as a bright reddish-orange color, turn back to the direction it had been visible as a blue-green object and darted back to it's original position in the sky that we had first noticed it. There it turned back to to the blue-green and started to maneuver through the sky as something very different then fireworks or helicopter or anything that I've ever seen. I called for my wife to hurry back out side and look at this object. I called to her twice and finally asked her to drop whatever she was doing and please come now! (Meanwhile fireworks are going off all around us and this craft has our rapt attention)! My wife came back out and immediately started to film it on her smartphone, we ended up with approx. seven minutes of video but during that time all we could do is watch this object in between the burst of the fireworks celebration which it seemed very int! erested in as it seemed to be drawn to the larger explosions. It continued to change color between the blue-green to red-orange as it changed direction or sped up and slowed down. It had a range of speed from just hovering to darting through the sky in an instant, ascending, descending at times and changing course at very unusual angles, sometimes slowly, other times quickly. We all thought about what it could be, a very different firework, a helicopter, a blimp, a drone, a prank somebody conceived because everyone in the neighborhood would be watching up into the nighttime sky and what a dupe or "viral-video" that would make but in the end none of these made any sense. As in the end it darted out a bit of instant, returned half the distance and started to descend beyond the trees and went out of sight. We all at some point thought it was a UFO and explained what we each saw and all agreed it wasn't anything like any of us had seen before. My wife later uploaded her video to her computer and we both understood why 99% of the videos you see of the UFO sightings are so grainy, you just don't expect to see something like this and when you do you use the best tool available to you to record it and in this case it was a smartphone. Aliens, I don't know. UFO, meaning that none of us in our group could identify it, yes. I'm just hoping to see something about this on the news tomorrow to verify what we saw wasn't a July fourth event the city of Las Vegas put on to wow it's citizens! We're hoping others saw this as there have had to be dozens of witnesses with it being the 4th of July and so many would have been looking into the sky enjoying the firework celebrations. FOR DESCRIPTION OF THE EVENT BY VIDEO GO TO THE FOLLOWING YOU TUBE LINK; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn8GYeG7ajo

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #120146). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.