NUFORC Sighting 77109

Occurred: 2009-12-31 21:00 Local
Reported: 2010-08-10 19:17 Pacific
Duration: 3 mins.
No of observers: 1

Location: Slidell, LA, USA

Shape: Sphere
Characteristics: Lights on object

Two lighted translucent spherical craft traveling slowly on a parallel course towards New Orleans, LA

I am a retired college instructor and former private pilot familiar with many types of aircraft. I had not been drinking on the night of the sighting.

I was at my home in Slidell, Louisiana, on the night of December 31, 2009 when the sighting occured. I went outside on my back deck at approximately 9:00 P.M. to observe the New years Eve fireworks going off in my neighborhood. I happened to look straight up and saw what I thought at first to be some unusual fireworks. In a few seconds however, I realized I was looking at two strange aircraft which were way too high up to be fireworks. I saw two identical, perfectly spherical, internally lighted, translucent globes which were predominantly pink in color with uneven pastel blue and gray bands around the globe. They were not brightly lit, nor did they have any other visible lights on them such as navigation lights, but they were easily visible in the night sky. They had no visible windows or openings that I could see.

They were each about the size of a small house and were at an altitude of about 1,000 to 1,200 feet, and were moving from the Northeast to the Southwest in the general direction of New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain. They were flying on a perfectly parallel course at a distance of about an eigth of a mile from one another at exactly the same speed, which appeared to be about 50 t0 60 miles per hour. One was slightly ahead of the other. They eventually disappeared into some low hanging clouds a mile or so from where I was standing. In all, I viewed them for about three minutes, and never heard a sound from them.

The most unusual and distinctive features of the craft were the flange-like collars they had around the bottoms of the globes. From these collars were coming flames which looked like regular fire, not a rocket flame. These flames did not appear to be any kind of a propulsion system because the flames were deflected backwards by the wind created by the speed of the objects moving through the air on a perpendicular course to the bottom of the globes. When they first passed over me, I was able to look straight up into the burning cavity created by the collar on the bottom of the globe and it reminded me of what looking into an upside down burning can of Sterno might look like.

These craft looked like they could have been man-made objects, but no man-made objects with these attributes could possibly fly in the way that these did. I've never seen anything like these craft before or since this sighting so I have to classify them as being unidentified flying objects.

Posted 2010-08-24