Flash over Lebanon, OR

The report, as filed

Last night (9/9/2015), I walked out of my house at about 8:30 pm to go close the door on our chicken coop for the evening. As I was walking back up the driveway towards my house I saw a red, blue, and white cluster of lights traveling up from the south. The cluster flew directly overhead (traveling in a northerly direction). I initially thought it was a plane. Where I live, it is not uncommon to see red flashing running lights of commercial airplanes flying south to north. My guess is that these planes fly up from California heading north to the Portland airport. So they are often visible in the Willamette Valley (where I am located). The planes stick to a regular pathway, and I see them on a fairly regular basis (sometimes during the day and sometimes at night). Nothing unusual about it. I am not an aviation expert, however I am convinced the lights I saw last night were not airplanes. For the following reasons: 1) There were at least 12 different sets of these flashing lights visible over a period of three hours 2) Several times they stopped moving, clustered together, and then changed directions 3) The lights were brighter than a commercial aircraft and appeared lower in the sky than the planes I sometimes see in the night sky. In addition, the paths that these lights took did not conform to the regular pathways I see commercial aircraft travel. They were predominantly moving south to north, however not all of them. Some came from other directions (out of the west moving east, or out of the east moving north. I was very intrigued by what I was watching, so I went into my house and asked my wife to come outside. She came out onto the lawn and we both watched at least four different sets of these lights traveling in a south to northerly direction over the course of about five minutes. She shrugged and said she didn’t know what they were and went back into the house. So after a few minutes, I went into the house too. About 30 minutes later, I went back outside to see if the lights were still around. And they were. Over the course of the next two hours I watched them travel around the sky. It was kind of cold (upper 40’s, low 50’s) so I didn’t stay outside the entire time. I’d watch them for 20 minutes or so, go in the house to warm up, then go back out again. I took about six short videos of the lights with my cell phone. However, none came out very well. The video caught a few blinking flashes, but the quality is pretty poor. At about 11:15 pm, I went back out to check again and they were gone. So by my count they were in the sky from about 8:30 (just after dark) and hung around for almost three hours. The general pattern of travel and behavior of the lights were as follows: a) They traveled from the southern horizon (like at the tree line) then traveled north-northeast to basically the other horizon. So I would look south and watch them come up, fly overhead (or in some cases say 10 degrees off the eastern horizon) then I’d have to turn 180 degrees until I was facing north. The lights would come to rest above the northern horizon and hold that position. That wasn’t the exclusive pattern. Sometimes it was the opposite (coming out of the north, then coming to a stop on the southern horizon). I also saw them coming out of the east (as if they were coming over from the direction of the City of Bend). Others would came out of the west. However I would say 85% of the time the pattern was south to north, then coming to a stop in the northern sky. Then they would either blink out or keep moving north until they were out of sight. One cluster seemed to sit there the entire time I was watching. Most of the others seemed to move around, come and! go, but this one seemed to remain in view constantly. b) The speed of travel wasn’t particularly fast. I would say slightly faster than what a commercial aircraft speed looks like in the sky. They certainly weren’t zipping around, darting from one corner to another at high speeds. Just sort of a lazy, steady speed moving from one side of the horizon to the other. c) Over the period of time that I watched these things, a few of the light clusters approached each other. At one time—I saw three clusters come fairly close together and hold their position for a few minutes. Then they moved back away from each other. That really convinced me that something about this was quite strange and certainly not an airplane. I suppose they could have been helicopters. We’ve had a lot of wildfires in the region this summer and maybe there were helicopters moving equipment around? That’s the only explanation that I can think of. And I think that’s a bit of a stretch since I didn’t hear any sound whatsoever. Again, I’m no aviation expert—however it would seem dangerous for helicopters to fly so close together in clusters at nighttime. At one point, I tried contacting a friend of mine who lives in the neighborhood to see if he could see them too. Unfortunately, it was late by then and I wasn’t able to reach him. However, I was glad to see on your web-site that there was a couple from Lebanon that reported something similar on 8/19/2015 and on 8/11/2015. I wish to remain anonymous, however would be glad to talk by phone or exchange info by email if you would like any additional details. Thanks for your time. (( We spoke at length via telephone with the witness, and he sounded to us to be exceptionally eloquent and sober-minded. Also, because of both his academic background, and his line of work, we suspect that he is an excellent, and highly reliable, witness. PD

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #121858). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.