Fireball over Strafford, MO

The report, as filed

Taken from my post on reddit's r/ufos sub: This took place last night, about 2:40 AM CST, in rural Greene County, MO. I was outside smoking a cigar in the middle of the night in front of my garage, which faces my neighbor's woods. Kept seeing bright lights through the trees, which is very abnormal. The brush and canopy are thick and it's tough to see anything through them even in the day. Looked like two lights to me. I went toward the treeline and started thinking it was a car on the road parked on the hill outside my driveway. Turned back to the garage and quickly grabbed protection (an axe handle, about baseball-bat shaped) because I thought it was a potential robbery. Nobody would ever park on that hill unless they were trying to hide from being seen. Went back, watched more, just had the sensation something wasn't right. The lights kept getting brighter. I went inside, grabbed my phone (Pixel 3 XL), and came back and started recording, and was still thinking it was a car on the road. As I walked down my driveway I realized it clearly wasn't. I realized what I was looking at was above my other neighbor's property across the street. A big field with a few trees deep in it. At first it was one bright solid light, but as I moved toward my garbage dumpster, it came into view as several other lights. For some reason I started thinking it was a fire in the sky. Couldn't make sense of it. Just kept recording and watching it for about 10 minutes. It seemed to get dimmer, then brighter. I couldn't figure out the shape. Only after watching the video did I realize that it seems to have been several different objects. My guess is three. After a while, one disappeared, which made the overall appearance dimmer. Bit later, another disappeared, leaving just a single glowing orb. Should've mentioned earlier that these primarily appeared red-orange to me, but the color absolutely shifted. They/it were solid white like a star at one point. Then, the last one rather than simply disappearing seemed to quickly fly off. I couldn't upload to imgur. No clue why. I'll post imgbb links in a comment as well. Postimages claims to not resize or degrade: Postimages album: https://postimg.cc/gallery/JHMjGRg The video I have is 3.8 GiB. My connection sucks. I have no way to upload it without re-encoding it, so I made an album instead. In the video, I zoomed in and out for perspective, but also lost it several times as I had to change position or was observing it without thinking much about recording. Video was taken on a Pixel 3 XL using Lineage. Screenshots were taken from mpv while rewatching the video on PC.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #164977). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.