Formation over Sahuarita, AZ

The report, as filed

From 2015 - 2017 I was in Sahuarita, Az, 20 miles south of Tucson. I was staying at a friend's ranch which backs up to the Santa Rita Mountains and some of the last 'open range' left in America. The government has so much land there they literally let people graze cattle or do whatever they want on the land. I was recovering from an assault with a baseball bat, struck to head several times and spent three years in rehab therapy. Coming from LA, I had never seen nighttime skies like that. The nearest town, Sahuarita, was 10 miles away and has a light pollution ban on any white lights, so when the magnificent sunsets were over, you were left with a sky that looked like a planetarium. My eyes were hyper sensitive to light following the assault, and I couldn't watch television or any synthetic light of any kind. So I would sit on the porch or stand out in the open corral and stair up the stars, usually meditating and praying my brain would eventually recover. One night, I was standing out in the corral, and I noticed a light, what I thought was a meteor or falling star streak across the nighttime sky. It was common place to witness 'shooting stars' as frequently as every few minutes. However this one straked across the sky from the south west across/ above the Santa Ritas and when I assumed it would disappear as they always had, the light stopped, remained in the air, got brighter white, then dimmed, then turned red, moved across the sky to my east. It stopped again, then went what looked to me as up, stopped again and began flashing green, red, and back to white. Over the next few minutes it continued to hover, move as fast as if I had a laser pointer, then stop again. I went from thinking my brain was hallucinating to having a reaction to my meds, to accepting this was real. I went back to the ranch house and called for my friend to come out and look at this. She reluctantly came out and when I pointed to the light she said, "Oh yeah, you're just seeing this? I guess your head was pretty messed up!" I looked at her dumbfounded, was this happening? She went on to say, that's nothing, when she was living on a ranch years ago, she actually saw one land while on a late night ride through the desert. My friend is a Champion Barrel Racer and works as a Science Teacher for 'at risk' high school students. She is one of the smartest people I know and has an advanced degree in Animal Science from U of A. Not someone who fell off the apple cart. My eyes were so sensitive to light that I began to see other strange lights, sometimes several at once (the most I remember seeing was a group of 8). One of the first things I did when my eyes began to accept synthetic light from screens was to download a Skytracker app so I could identify what I was looking at. I was able to instantly identify each star I pointed at and even satellites. For months, I would go out when my alert for the Space Station would pass by. But every time I saw one of these lights, the app showed black space on the screen. My friend's marathon running partner is a top operational engineer over-seeing top secret programs at Raytheon. I asked her if they did test flights over the area. She told me officially Raytheon in Tucson deals with guidance systems and does not engage with the Airforce base there, nor to they do any aerial testing themselves. Unofficially she said, we are a multi-billion dollar defense company, which means we make a lot of stuff. Expensive stuff with cutting edge 'new' technology. And that technology needs to be tested in real world scenarios. She finished by saying, there's a reason we're in the desert and not in some city like LA. And there's a reason the Airforce is here and has a secret ops division. So you're smart, I'll let you figure the rest out for yourself. When I described what I saw, she said 'theoretically, if we had a project that required aerial testing, I would know about it as it falls under my team. But right now, we are in development phase so there is n! o testing going on. What you saw most likely wasn't ours." I asked her later about it more, maybe 6 months later and as I had gotten to know her better, she opened up one night a bit more. She basically said there's a lot of stuff that goes on that people are unaware of. Since most people don't just stare up at the sky for hours they are unaware of what goes on. Whatever the light was, I continued to see more until eventually I became bored with seeing strange lights. I would say the longest I went without seeing strange lights was two weeks. I completely believe most of what I saw was military, but as my for lack of better words, my spiritual psychic side definitely became more aware after the brain injury and I began to have a feeling or 'vibe' about what I was seeing. There was a certain sense when I would see what I 'felt' was man-made. Most of what I witnessed had that vibe. But on at least 10 other occasions, what I saw had a different vibe all together and felt very foreign or strange. Sorry for the long story, I'm sure it could be shorter but my writing is still not great after the injury. I don't think I'm unique in seeing this. The local ranchers I met and talked to all seemed to accept that strange lights would and have appeared over the Santa Ritas going back as far as anyone could remember. One old man told me since he was a kid and far before we developed drones. Anyway, thought I'd share. I am back in LA now having mostly recovered, but I would think the lights haven't stopped and anyone wishing to watch them only needs to drive out past the town of Sahuarita 10 or 15 miles and you will see them too. Witness indicates that the date of the sighting is approximate. PD

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #148464). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.