Sphere over Ririe, ID

The report, as filed

We setup camp with our tents about fifty yards apart since we both snore loudly. My tent is mostly screen without the rainfly, ideal for sky watching from your sleeping bag. I woke around 02:30 MDT and was watching the Perseid meteor shower. About an hour later, as I was falling asleep, I noticed a weird light near my brother’s tent. Thinking he was just relieving himself, I went back to sleep. About five minutes later, I noticed the light was there but it had drifted southwest across a meadow of thistles. This lead me to realize it was not my brother because you can’t walk through thistles. The light continued drifting about and then seemed to climb the south canyon wall, which was several hundred feet high. This caught my attention so I sat up and watched intently to figure out what I was seeing. My first though was a drone, but there was no noise, so I eliminated that possibility. I thought maybe a Sky Lantern candle balloon, but they don’t move that erratically and the air was calm. It was moving too swiftly to be a Search and Rescue Team. Then, the light drifted towards me off the cliff and into the river canyon. It hovered behind some trees that I could vaguely see in the starlight. The moon was not visible. Brighter stars and metors were visible above through the smokey air but none behind the light. The moving light was below the canyon wall from my vantage point so there were no stars around it. At this point, I decided to grab my Samsung S10+ cellphone and attempt to get a photograph to enlarge for identification. As I took photos, the spherical light started bouncing around up and down and zigzagging back and forth. I switched to video mode and shot some videos. I’ve emailed everything to ufocntr@nwlink.com. Around half an hour into the event, I decided to wake my brother to let him see it. I crept over to his tent using a red night vision headlamp. I woke him and it took him a couple of minutes to throw on some close and get his tent unzipped. We were unable to see the anomaly. We did see Jupiter higher in the sky just NW of where I’d seen the light moving. I am sure that what I witnessed wasn’t Jupiter. Jupiter appeared as a solid white bright round object. The roving light was not a solid color and was fuzzy-looking, not solid. The moving light that I saw was down in the river valley and was below the top of the cliff. In my sightings, I could vaguely see two tall conifer trees that the light was behind. I am hoping my photos or videos can be enhanced to show those trees as evidence that the light was below the canyon wall and, therefore, not a planet seen through the light smoke. As I was filming, I was sitting on the ground with my elbows on my knees, trying to steady the camera. In the videos, there are a couple of places where I zoomed in. This shows sort of a permanent enlargement of the light. In other places, the light itself changes sizes back and forth or blinks out entirely for a second or two. It also changes shape and color a few times. In attempting to keep the object in the viewfinder, I moved the camera a few times, which could have resulted in some of the motion seen. Mostly the camera was held still. It appeared to me to be between the size of a very large beach ball and an RV. It was difficult to size because of the lack of depth perspective. In appearance, it was a glowing sphere with hazy, fuzzy edges. I never perceived a defined edge to it.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #164391). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.