NUFORC Sighting 06084

Occurred: 1996-07-09 23:30 Local - Approximate
Reported: 1999-04-05 00:00 Pacific
Duration: 30 minutes
No of observers: 2

Location: St. Louis, MO, USA

Shape: Triangle

The object looked like a triangular shaped solid welder's arc.

Three years ago my brother and I observed a triangular shaped object in clouds of the type Altocumulus over St. Louis City. The object was as bright as a welder's arc, and remained stationary for almost half an hour. Occasionally the object would disappear, and reappear in the exact spot. The clouds surrounding the object had dozens of lights "swimming" through them. The lights looked like the end of a Hollywood searchlight, were not coming from the ground, and seemed to be inside the clouds. The lights followed the boundaries of the clouds, and when they would travel from one cloud to the next, the would disappear until they reached the next cloud. These lights darted about like fish in water, and seemed to have some sort of repetitive pattern to their movement. We called the St. Louis Police Department and several news stations, but the incident was brushed off as "probably just lights coming from the airport". Well, the airport is 25 miles from the location at which we observed the object and lights, and we could not imagine how the airport could have been "beaming" lights of this nature to this location. Nor would it explain the triangular shaped object, which appeared and disappeared in the same spot in the sky several times in the half hour we watched it. This object was not a faint glow, it was extrememly distinct and bright. I have included an animated rendering of what we saw in an e-mail I sent to you. To save file size, I did not include as many lights as we actually observed. In truth, the entire cloud covering was saturated with these "swimming" lights.

Posted 1999-04-26