NUFORC Sighting 51287

Occurred: 1991-09-18 22:00 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2006-07-09 16:58 Pacific
Duration: 2 to 3 minutes
No of observers: 2

Location: Olympia, WA, USA

Shape: Changing
Characteristics: Lights on object, Emitted other objects, Changed Color, Aircraft nearby

Single star morphs into Hoberman Sphere, rotates, reverts, turns red, divides, flies away in formation

I don't talk much about this (in fact I've never told anyone but a couple close friends) but my (then, now long ex) girlfriend and I witnessed something strange together one night in the early 1990s.

The exact date is unknown now but documentary evidence from the event indicates it was definitely between mid September and mid October 1991. We were sitting in my car looking at the water at the Port of Olympia, Washington. Time was late evening, with clear sky transitioning from dusk to night. Exact location was parked at the KGY radio station tower at Port of Oly facing north looking over the water of Budd Inlet, with West Oly to the left, East Bay Drive and Priest Point Park to the right.

There was a very bright star (or so it seemed) shining singularly in the sky out over the water directly in front of us, but looking quite far away, as all stars normally do ( ! ). We must have sat looking at it for a good half hour while talking about life and random things.

Quite suddenly this star 'expanded' for lack of any other way to describe it, exactly the way that a Hoberman Sphere does (I found out many years later what a Hoberman Sphere is, and just about crapped myself the first time I saw one in motion its movement looked so similar), but with no visible structure, just one point of light expanding into numerous points of light, perhaps 20 or more, moving quite fast into a giant and perfectly spherical formation of several star-like lights. The formation resembled a grid over a globe with a light at each connecting point between latitude and longitude, but again, no visible structure, just lights in this formation.

This assemblage proceeded to rotate there, HUGE, the lights traveling around the far side of the formation visible through the front side lights moving the opposite direction, in the air for several seconds while we stared slack-jawed in disbelief. I sat silent and stared while she repeated like a mantra "this is not happening".

As suddenly as it had initially expanded (and after rotating there in the air for a very long moment) it collapsed in an instant into what appeared to be a single star again, the same as we had stared at while talking all that time before.

Just when we were wiping our brows and "WTF!!!"-ing over what we had just seen, it slowly began turning red and pulsating. Then it divided. The star (as it were) remained stationary there and began ejecting duplicates of itself (for lack of better description), 5 of them if I recall, appearing one at a time from the stationary light, same color red, all pulsing in time with one another, traveling at an even distance from one another at a constant and relatively slow rate across the sky away from their starting position, heading east / southeast. As soon as they were evenly spaced and enroute the original "star" took up a trailing position in the single file formation and they all flew off slowly over us and eventually the treeline and out of sight.

All of this, start to finish took maybe 2 or 3 minutes. The whole thing happened in complete silence, whatever it/they were made no sound at all, which hit us when, as they were flying away, we noticed a small general aviation airplane flying a different direction but at a much higher altitude. We could just make out the distant drone of the prop engine from the airplane but could hear nothing from the light formation traveling visibly well closer to us. This was when it also dawned on us how much closer the whole event had to have happened to us than it looked to the eye at first.

We were praying that pilot would see these things and perhaps react in some way we could take as confirmation he saw it, but no, they were below and behind him and heading away from his position. He flew right on wherever he was going, apparently unaware.

Optical illusion? Sober group hallucination? Swamp Gas? In all the years since, I never have figured out what the hell that thing was, and I would be shocked if I ever did. It / they moved with obvious coordination which implies some kind of intelligence / control, it was like nothing I've ever seen before or since, I am (after seeing it) hard pressed to believe it to be anything of "known" terrestrial technology, I have resigned to the likelihood that I will never know what it was at all. I would have written my own self off as nuts the very evening I saw it (I was never really a ufo 'believer') if not that my girlfriend had sat right there beside me and witnessed the whole thing too.

I went back over a partial video shot of the event (yes believe it or not I had a video camera in the car but the battery had been dead and was only holding a residual charge from sitting around, it was enough to power the camera about ten seconds), the video is completely useless because it was getting dark (everything was plainly visible to the naked eye, but with this cutting edge late '80s video camera, all one can really make out is a blank screen with a few strange flickering whitish dots on it that seem to come and go. The only anecdotal content of any value is the audio track of my girlfriend and myself freaking out (apparently I wasn't silent the whole time!), ((allusion to profanity deleted)) etc in the few seconds. Unfortunately I didn't have the wherewithal to hit the "show date/time" function in those few seconds. The best I can do is note that the unrelated video clip shot immediately before it was on September 17th, 1991. This event was probably within the next few nights or up to a couple/few weeks (?) after that, I have no way to know for sure now.

NUFORC Note:

Witness indicates that the date of the event is approximate. PD

Posted 2006-07-16