Sphere over Portland, OR

The report, as filed

At roughly 8:55pm, Friday, April 1st, 2016, I was standing in my backyard looking up at Polaris to the north and Orion to the S/SW, admiring the clear sky and beautiful weather of the evening. Suddenly, I noticed a very bright and solid light originating from just to the right of the star Saiph, in the Orion constellation. The direction of travel was S/SW to N/NE. It was travelling quickly enough to be thought of as a low flying plane, only there were no position or navigation lights or even a strobe light to be seen. Just a perfectly solid bright white light that did not change in shape or luminosity as it changed its position in the sky. There was no sound at all. Quite surprisingly, it looked as if the light was drifting ever so slightly to the east, in the same way a gliding bird might be moved by wind currents. This took the object directly above me. There it slightly paused for about 1 second as it changed direction and moved in a very straight line directly to the East. I called my wife and we both watched the light, which continued to make no sound and show no other lighting other than the constant bright white light, until it got smaller and smaller and disappeared into the distance. About 10 minutes later, I returned to the backyard with my Sony A7000 fitted with a 55-210 zoom lens, set to maximum zoom. Within one minute I saw a faint object flying directly South to North, exactly from where the original sighting began by Orion. I recorded video as I watched the dim object suddenly grow in brightness (and apparent size, but hard to know if this was just a function the increased glow). The object was constantly in and out of focus, as the Autofocus struggled to keep up. Again, about 10 minutes later, I returned to the backyard…this time with the camera set to manual infinity focus…and I saw a small faint object moving from the North/Northeast toward the Southeast. I started recording and called my wife to come back out. I had no tripod with me. The object all but disappeared and had been blindly pointing the camera, by hand, at the blank sky where I had roughly last seen it…when suddenly, it flashed in brightness and we could see it rapidly “expand” and “contract” after each flash. Most flashes were very bright, but others were more subtle and undulating. This did not last long. Perhaps one minute. This last sighting occurred in the same portion of sky that the initial object had disappeared in to. I continued to watch and record the sky, but it never flashed again, and I saw no other objects in any other portion of the sky. I have video of the last two sightings. The last sighting is the best quality due to the manual infinity focus, but they both lacked a tripod so it is unfortunately very shaky.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #126673). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.