Sphere over Crofton/ Gambrills, MD

The report, as filed

I am a retire firefighter. I was sitting in my vehicle at a parking lot looking up at the sky, as I do on nights when it is clear, and I noticed an object in the sky that seemed to be changing colors. With the naked eye, the object was about a quarter inch in diameter. It wasn’t the typical lights of an aircraft. It was stationary, so I got my small camera and tried to zoom in on the object. It appeared, through the viewfinder, to be a sphere, but it was shaggy looking on the edges and it seemed to have divots in it. While snapping pictures, I saw blue, and then blue and orange, and after that, purple (see photos). The object wasn’t high enough in the sky to be a star but too high to be an attachment to a tower. There were airplanes coming toward me to eventually land in a Baltimore airport, but this was much higher than they were. I am curious to find out if this is manmade or otherwise. *We are sending you the original photos. Please enlarge for details. When we enlarged them, we were able to see details, color, shape, and edging.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #173770). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.