NUFORC Sighting 33967

Occurred: 2003-10-26 00:30 Local
Reported: 2003-12-20 02:14 Pacific
Duration: 2-3 minutes
No of observers: 0

Location: Maud, OK, USA

Shape: Unknown
Characteristics: Lights on object

object moved from south to north but had an unusual vertical bobbing action to it.

Although I'm from a major metropolitan area (OK City, OK), the observation was made at my father's home. He lives in an extremely small town about 60 miles from me.

I'm generally considered a no-nonsense individual.

I've been on this planet nearly 50 years and while it's possible I may have seen a ufo in the past, I'm almost always the first person to say, No, that was an airplane, or heavenly body or atmospheric condition or whatever. Nevertheless, on Sunday, October, 26th, 2003, at approximately 12:30 am while admiring the vividly clear 'country' sky, I spotted a brighter-than-usual light off to the s-se not far above the horizon. The intensity caught my eye but then as I tried to figure out what satellite I might be watching, it began to move in a way for which I was not prepared.

The movement was vertical. Up... and then down again. Repeatedly, at about 1 full cycle per second.

While I could not see a 'body' attached to the light, if the light had been all there was to the object then the amount of vertical movement was (I roughly calculated) about twenty times the diameter of the light. Since I had no idea at first how far away it was I was using relative measurements.

In any case, my first impulse was to think my eye was 'playing tricks' on me. However, fatigue was not a likely answer since when I'm at home I work as a computer programmer and my most productive hours are from around 11:00 pm to approximately 6:00 am. In other words, that's the part of the day when I'm most alert.

Another thing: I had my right eye damaged in an automobile accident 11 years ago, and while this may seem like a hindrance, I consider it an advantage in situations like this because since the car wreck I've learned to judge depth differently than most people.

Also, although I program computers for a living now, I spent most of my life as a draftsman and had a great many opportunities to work with trigonometric functions while drawing various layouts for anything from buildings to bridges.

I'm no stranger to calculating distances using triangulation. In addition, I've had numerous trig and calc classes in both high school and college.

So, since the object appeared to be stationary relative to latitude and longitude, I thought maybe I could judge its location by how it lined up with a major near-by tree limb as I moved around the yard.

This is not a bad technique. In fact, I judged the light to be 1.5 to 2 miles away.

At this point the idea of ufo had not crossed my mind. I thought maybe it was a ground search light from a near-by town. Problem is, most small towns don't own search lights of that magnitude. Plus, the sky was very clear (no clouds) and the air was thin which meant no moisture for light to bounce off.

In retrospect there was another thing that was gnawing away at me and I didn't realize it at the time: The thing seemed to be waiting for me to watch it before it started moving. I know that sounds weird but it sure seems that way now.

To continue...

Just about the time I thought I'd figured out how far away it was, it began to move northward while continuing the vertical movement.

Not all that far away it wasn't moving very fast. I'm estimating it leveled out at around 60 mph and by this time I'd estimated it's relative angle to the ground to be approximately 15 degrees. It was fairly low on the horizon.

Within the range of its vertical movement, its average deviation was consistent during this northward movement.

After a minute of so of watching it move toward a point which I would estimate to be about a half mile east of me, I began to get concerned. Unless this thing was a balloon, I should have been hearing some noise. However, there are two problems with this line of thought: 1) A balloon couldn't bob up and down that quickly and 2) On a clear night like that night, sound travels pretty well. I could easily hear highway traffic a half mile away.

The concern finally got to me and I ran to the front door and yelled to my dad.

By the time he got his shoes on and made it outside, the light had moved behind some trees that line the east side of his property.

I pointed to the area of sky north of the trees where the object should re-appear and wanted him to see this thing with strange flight behavior.

Unfortunately, it never re-appeared and he finally gave up and went back inside.

I know this may be disappointing compared to other reports and I barely consider it worthy of most people's valuable time just to read it, but I tell it here because I have no logical explanation for what I saw. It actually happened and it really gave me goose bumps when I realized that what I was looking at might be something from our government's secret arsenal or perhaps something even more exotic like an extraterrestrial object.

By the time you get my age, firsts don't happen as often as they used to but this was definitely a first for me.

Posted 2004-01-17