Changing over Nags head, NC

The report, as filed

My girlfriend and I were laying out on the beach looking at the stars and listening to the waves on the beach,at about 1145 pm we decide to go back to our hotel room,we get up I'm folding the blanket up and have my back to the ocean when she asked me to look at a light she said came out of the water.When I noticed it it appeared to me to be a red maker light for a boat.We watched it for a few mins and it had shot up into the air shined bright enough to light up the ocean surface as if it was a full moon.2 smaller objects dropped down out of it and went up one on each side and stopped,to were they appeared to be stars.the bigger object started strobing different colors and continues to hover,I pull out the flashlight I had and started to flash it on and off and the object would mimic what I was doing,I ran 400yrds north on the beach and the object moved the same direction following the light,I ran back 400 yrds south on the beach and it moved in the same direction and then shot up in the air and appeared to transform into a cloud and began to move through the sky,I began to use the strobe setting on my flashlight and it got bright orangeish red and much bigger and shot towards us at a speed so fast and with a feeling of fear, I've never been as scared in my life as I was that night,I ran leaving my girlfriend and when I realized she wasn't with me I called to her to come on and she says that she can't, move.she didn't know if she was just scared stiff or if the object didn't want her to move.the object the shoots back out over the ocean back up in the sky and then gets small like the other 2 and just appears as a star.it felt like we were watching it for 30-45 mins but when we got back to the room it was 4am we were missing time.i would take a polygraph test to this event cause as odd as it sounds to say it,it's honestly changed me and how I see life and what I've been taught and my religious beliefs.We couldn't sleep that night ,it makes us feel almost crazy cause if we tried to tell people the story they would just say we are crazy.i won't even go in the ocean anymore cause there is something in there that we don't know about as a human race.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #174396). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.