Light over Albuquerque, NM

The report, as filed

I am an educated person who has obtained an Associate and Bachelor degrees of Science in fields where observation is important. Like anyone I look up at the beautiful sky at night to see the Moon and Venus this time of year. They are located in the western sky, the land down below is a flat plateau of lava flow remains from days past, from Albuquerque. To the East, the Sandia Mountains which from view consists of rocky granite boulders to scattered pine and juniper forests and rises approximately 1 mile high above Albuquerque. To the East is where I am drawn at 830pm, finishing up some yard work, and the wind has calmed with sunset. Between the houses, at a distance seems it is above the mountain I think, there is a Steady Red Light with a slight strobe effect to it. I thought I saw a white light strobe behind the red light and then it is solid red again. Let me give my location if you looked at a map of Albuquerque. I am between Paseo Del Note and Academy St. and Ventura Blvd is one block to my east. Well, it is probably the helicopter, I think, it is always flying around at night and making rounds. No, wait, its a plane coming in from he East to fly over the mountain and it will move south. Well, now I am interested, it appears now to be standing still and there is no sound all. Now it is dark out, and it appears to me that it is way over the mountain at a great distance. I keep a steady stare at the object, now it slowly appears to be am object that is hovering above the mountain. Only a slight, vibration made it appear to wobble maybe due to wind that is how I knew it was hovering. I an see the top of the mountain and sky and then the Red Light. One minute goes by and object slowly rises like a balloon a short distance up and stops. It seems like it is observing something on the ground, which the houses completely cut off the lower half of the mountain view from my vantage point.Staring and curious, it rises very slowly a short distance again and stops. What the heck is that? No one around to see with me! Ok, I will see what it does and that was 20 seconds of time. 1 minute 30 seconds, the Red Light, starts to descend down, I am going to lose it behind the mountain it seems, it gets to the top and lowers and the Red Light is still there! It is in front of the mountain, not behind. Much closer than I thought it was, but that is the foot hills. There are houses and desert out there. Are they making contact with someone? And in that part of the foothills there are no street lights just houses out there. I can see the Red Light lowering straight down steadily. Dark mountain behind makes it clear to see. No back and forth or pausing, just down. It goes down and I lose sight of it because of the houses. Now that is all fine and sounds really interesting right? I am not done. Ok, I have to get higher, how? The place I am working has an above ground pool with a 10 foot scaffolding deck to jump into the pool, I run to the ladder about 6 feet from my location and climb, swing door in and move to the location I had seen it lower but now I am higher about 10 feet. I move back and forth looking to see if I can get sight of it. Then I did. I see the light, but it is white! Iit has moved to my left as if it traveled a shirt distance, the light is moving up, the light goes out! Staring the light turns green, rising then it completely goes out as it was rising. After that either is was in a spectrum now that was invisible to my sight or it moved out fast, but it was cloaked from then on. I urgently tried to gain sight of it and it was getting late out, dark and the lower half of the mountain was not visible to me due to houses. That was disappointing. The whole sighting was very quick. Took at the max about 3 minutes. I decided to come and see if anyone else had made a report about it or saw something. I have seen the helicopter and what is important is that you hear it before you see it. It is loud. There was no sound. At my distance, and the canyon of the mountain behind it should of made an echo or sound, there was none. An important note here is that the helicopter circles when observing areas and keeps moving, rarely to stop and hover, wind may be a factor here. The lights and the way they changed were not of the normal craft seen in our skies in NM. Never have a seen a Green light on the helicopter. Once again, sequence was red light then slight white strobe behind and then solid red, lowers moves to the north at low altitude went from invisible to white while rising and invisible to green still rising and then gone. I just want to add that when I first saw the red light, I caught a slight glimpse of white dots to the north of the red light as if they were in relation to each other. But that was a 2 second glimpse and then it was only the red light. I omitted it from the factual observtion because I doubted what I saw. Thank you. Thank you for your time.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #155924). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.