Cigar over Warren, NJ

The report, as filed

I walked outside to smoke a cigarette in my backyard around 11:30pm. I’ve been looking for ufos my whole life, but have never actually seen one. My grandfather was a ufo “quack” and said he’d seen a few, and told me you can identify them by their movements, because they can move laterally, unlike a plane, and up and down as well. These objects were beyond the brush of trees separating my yard from our neighbor’s yard, and I thought initially they were just extraordinarily bright stars, though I wondered why there were three of them (at first) in a unique formation. I noticed those first, and kept smoking my cigarette, then saw what I thought was a plane or two fly across the sky overhead. I had never anticipated ufos having flashing lights similar to those of planes (that’s how I know that what I see when I occasionally observe the sky thinking to chance to see a ufo—mostly out of nostalgia for my grandfather, though I do find the subject interesting—are just planes). I heard the sound of a plane passing by, but since the sound is delayed from that distance, I didn’t know which objects were emitting the noise. I followed the objects across the sky, and they went in the general direction of the other objects, but didn’t “meet up” with the others, as I half expected them to. At this point I still thought the two I’d seen overhead (not in the sky across my neighbor’s yard) were planes, but then I saw a passenger plane with its lights on fly straight (and only straight) across the sky, and pinned the noise on that. I kept watching to see if once the nearest plane passed, the delayed sound of its flight would remain as I scanned the other objects, but it didn’t. When I looked back at the sky across my neighbor’s yard, these two objects—two flashing lights (red and white, I believe) at each end, it seemed—were flying slowly and soundlessly in an ascending pattern, then dipping again. I wondered if they were drones (flying illegally), because maybe drones make less noise than planes, but counting them all together, at different points in the sky, I believe I saw about six, so I didn’t know what to make of it. I thought also they might be helicopters, for a fire nearby or something, but they seemed close enough to emit some noise (like a helicopter would, I think), and emitted none. The objects (speaking of these last two primarily) seemed also to appear slightly larger and smaller at various points, as if they were also not just moving laterally and up or down, but also ever so slightly (from my visual perspective) in my direction and then back again. At this point there were two objects left, and I made out (I think) the shape of the one to the right. It was hard to know the shape of the others, but they all seemed to have blinking lights (again, unexpected), but between the blinking red and white lights at each end of the one I could see, there seemed to be a cigar-shaped body to the object. These two objects made their way up, and then slightly down, moving to the left of my vision at a slow but steady pace all the while, and they seemed to concentrate themselves (this is in general of most of the objects I saw, but these two as well) into a bright single point of light occasionally, something resembling like a lightning bug or a fairy in a disney m! ovie. I got in my car and drove down the street to the martinsville part of the mountain (I live on the mountain section of warren nearby), trying to trace the lights, and drove around for about a half an hour looking for them, but came back without successfully tracking one. When I got back to my house there were no objects left in the sky anywhere around. I’m a grad student in english lit at montclair state university. I live with my cousin and a friend of ours. I grew up in flemington,nj and went to hunterdon central high school. I worked for a few years at central medical supply delivering equipment but then decided to go back to school to hopefully become a professor (hope that’s enough background info.).

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #126745). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.