Light over New York City, NY

The report, as filed

June 22, 2018, my wife and I had an after-dinner stroll along the promenade in Long Island City, New York. We took a seat somewhere between Long Island City and Hunter’s Point Ferry landings to rest and enjoy the view of Manhattan on the other side of the East River. At 8:30, or so, we spotted an object with a pair of red lights hovering above the skyline. The lights were a little too bright for me not to think it was odd. I joked that it was a UFO, without really putting too much stock in it. Still, there was something so strange about its brightness and its steadiness, like a snapshot in the sky, that I could not take my eyes off of it. The object made a vertical jump, held for a second, and then shot across the sky 3 to 5 miles toward the southern part of Manhattan in about 2 seconds, and that was when my jaw hit the ground. From where we sat, neither of us could determine the exact height of the object but it appeared higher than the Chrysler Building - a lot higher. My wife argues that it was probably a trick of the eye and that whatever we saw was in reality closer to us. She believes it flew lower and above the river’s edge. I disagree. I trust my sense of perspective. I can compare structural sizes and their spacial relationships as good as anyone. I can tell the difference between far and near, high and low, and I am convinced that what I saw was way up in the sky and away from the river’s edge! My wife said it was a helicopter. But after a real helicopter flew by, she clearly saw the difference. The helicopter’s lights were not as bright as the UFO’s. The helicopter was noisy. The UFO was silent. The helicopter wavered as it hovered. The UFO was as still as a statue. She said then it was probably a drone. I countered with the following: a drone has height restrictions. Again, the height and distance of what we saw could be argued, but you’ll never change my opinion. The UFO was at least a few thousand feet over the skyline and further west of the East River. After YouTubing videos of drone in flight at night, I can say that the behavior of a drone compared to that of the UFO is much different too. Like helicopters, drones are subject to air buffeting. They’re not perfectly steady. Their movements are not clean, sharp, symmetrically perfect like what I saw in the UFO. Describing the UFO’s movement was like someone using a right-angle straight edge on a laser pointer. It moved in two perfect straight lines, cutting over abruptly in a 90 degree angle. Also, like anything else in movement, drones display acceleration. The thing my wife and I saw did not show this. One moment it was there, the next it’s shooting across the sky. No acceleratio! n! It was amazing. One more thing: I don’t think the NYPD would allow anyone to fly a drone in an area crowded with helicopter traffic. Just saying. I wish I had recorded it, but I didn't really expect anything odd to happen. When it did, it happened too fast.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #141927). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.