NUFORC Sighting 82203

Occurred: 2011-07-04 21:30 Local
Reported: 2011-07-05 07:51 Pacific
Duration: ~ 15 minutes
No of observers: 1

Location: Parkland, WA, USA

Shape: Fireball
Characteristics: Lights on object

"Fireball" sighting south of Tacoma, Washington, lasted several minutes.

About 9:30pm (I'm guessing on the time, it was not yet completely dark to the west when this started) on July 4th, 2011, I was in my backyard taking video of the fireworks going off in the neighborhood.

I was panning back and forth as the aerials went off around me, but I wasn't looking through the lens; I had the LCD display turned out, but I was eyeballing for launches and then would turn the camera that way.

To the SSE, I noticed a red glow in the sky, automatically thought some sort of firework in the distance, but it wasn't moving, it didn't explode, it just sort of hung there. I turned the camera toward it, but it wasn't bright enough to show up on the LCD display. Nevertheless, I did keep the camera trained on it for about a minute by lining up the top of the camera and the side of the camera. My eyesight is not the best, (I'm in my 50's) but it seemed to have at least two points, high and low, producing the red glow, although they were very close to each other, but the point is that it did seem to have some structure, it wasn't just a point of light, and although I had no idea of the distance between us, the diameter of the glow was about a tenth of the diameter of the moon.

I went back to filming fireworks for a couple of minutes, went inside my house and transfer the .avi file from the SD card to my computer, and decided to go back outside and film some more.

This time I went into the street in front of my house, and although about ten minutes had passed, the red glowing object was still in almost the same position, although fainter and smaller, giving me the impression that it was moving away from me, although I couldn't really detect any movement.

Again I trained the camera on it by lining up top and side, but after about a minute of that, it became so faint that I could no longer see it.

This morning, 7/5, I did a search for UFO sightings, and I noticed immediately that there has been a lot of "fireball" sightings, very similar in description to what I saw, so I felt compelled to report this. I also can't imagine that I was the only one who noticed this, since so many people were looking to the sky watching fireworks.

Posted 2011-07-06