Formation over Lowell, MA
A witness account on file, unevaluated. Most of the archive rests here, and honestly so.
The report, as filed
I was outside in the outskirts of downtown Lowell, MA, last evening when I saw two bright, red lights in the northeast. My friend also witnessed what I saw and I pointed out the lights to a couple of other people. The lights were probably 10-15(?) degrees up from the horizon. They did not move. After a minute or so three other red lights appeared near them. They stayed there, seemingly not moving for a few minutes, and then slowly faded away one by one. The lights were red, maybe a bit orangey and roughly the same apparent brightness as Mars or Jupiter as they appear this summer. I took two photos, which unfortunately, are poor quality. However, I was able to plot a line on a map showing which direction the lights came from using buildings beneath the lights in the photos and where I was standing as references. The lights appeared above a facet of a building I can see on Google maps, so I believe the line of sight I made on the map is pretty accurate. I could not tell the distance, but I believe they were at least some miles away. I am aware that red lights can be military aircraft. To be fair Lawrence Municipal Airport and Pease Air Force Base are somewhat near the line of sight I plotted on the map. However, there were no other colors and the lights didn’t move or blink. Also, they didn't seem to be as deep a red as lights on military craft. They also didn’t line up with the runways of the two airports. They didn’t go behind clouds or the buildings nearby, they just faded out. I have been an avid sky watcher all of my life. From watching airplanes, to viewing planets and meteor showers, I am always looking up and telling friends about celestial events. I am fifty years old, and have never seen anything I could not explain before. I recently saw a very bright light traveling overhead and some Googling proved that it was the International Space Station flying over the Northeast. What I saw last night was not usual. We spoke via telephone with the witness, and he sounded to us to be quite sincere, and serious-minded. We suspect that he is a quite capable, and highly reliable, witness. PD
Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #129027). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.
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Routed to: Federal Aviation Administration · records window 2016-07-31 → 2016-08-17
From the same sky
Related entries
March 18, 2023 · 9:33 PM · LIGHT
Lowell, MA
Went to the window when I heard a plane passing by the area a little after 9pm. I spotted the plane heading away in a South West direction then noticed another light I thought was a helicopter. At first the light was only a small point of light in the sky but appeared to be moving closer to my location following along MA Rt. 3 North. After the plane was no longer audible I noticed no sound from the approaching light. The light was bright white with red flashes and appeared to be moving in erratic ways but in a direction closer towards my location. About halfway to when I lost sight the light about the size of a dime at arms length seemed to spread out creating a gradient of copies of in front of itself then snapped back to a more disk circle shape. I could not make out any detail of the underlying structure. The highway passes about six properties down from my location and watching the lights pass by it was about the size of a small plate at arms length. Estimating about 200 to 400 feet above the highway and I got the sense it was fairly large but totally silent. Anyone driving up MA Rt. 3 last night between 9-9:30pm should have had a pretty good view of the light show.
January 29, 2023 · 9:16 PM · LIGHT
Lowell, MA
Long red lights almost diamond shape floated slowly across the sky in a line formation distanced the same length from each other. They would then fade as they each got to the same point in the sky.
August 24, 2020 · 7:30 PM · OTHER
Lowell, MA
Weather was clear, humid, and virtually no breeze.
July 26, 2020 · 12:53 PM · OVAL
Lowell, MA
My husband and I were driving on I-95 from Massachusetts to Maine. We were on 495 near Lowell, MA at the time of the sighting. It was a clear day, around 1pm. Just below the cloud line there was a bright white oval shaped object hovering. We knew it was not an airplane because it was not moving in any direction- just hovering. I watched it intently as we drove to monitor any changes. It remained unmoving for several minutes before changing colors. It looked like it had rotated to show an underside of the craft, which was a grayish/black color. I turned around to tend to my daughter for a moment and when I looked back, it was gone. I searched the sky and the object was nowhere to be found. I took a photo while the object still presented as white, but I Unfortunately didn’t think to record exact location information. The information provided above is my best estimate of our location given the time that we left for our trip and the time the photo was taken.
July 15, 2020 · 9:00 PM · OTHER
Lowell, MA
While walking our dogs, my wife and I noticed a bright squared shaped light slowly rotating with another squared shape light. The two lights then proceeded to almost stack on top of each other & move east. The formation then stayed stationary and two red/green lights formed a triangular formation with the stacked lights. The light to the right of the stacked lights then moved west at a high rate of speed and was pulsating a dull light. We also noticed that all the stars in the sky seemed to form a triangular formation. The big dipper constellation was also highly visible.
November 13, 2019 · 4:00 PM · SPHERE
Lowell, MA
When stuck in traffic on I-95 north heading towards the route 3 exit I noticed a "balloon" shaped object high in the sky. The object looked like a metallic weather balloon, but it just hovered. the object was about the size of pea because how high it was it did not move just continually stayed in one position. I continued to look at it for about 20 seconds before a plane flying by passed in front of the object blocking my view for about 1 second. once the plane passed the object was no longer there.