NUFORC Sighting 127374

Occurred: 2016-05-12 22:40 Local
Reported: 2016-05-12 23:37 Pacific
Duration: 20 minutes
No of observers: 2

Location: Stateline, NV, USA

Shape: Triangle
Characteristics: Lights on object, Changed Color, Aircraft nearby

Several triangular lighted objects spotted above Lake Tahoe area.

My wife and I are vacationing near Lake Tahoe, and since it is so clear (and this being off-season, there’s not much else to do), she suggested we go star watching. This was at a little past 10:30PM It is almost pitch black up here near Heavenly Ski Resort, so the constellations are perfectly bright and visible. That’s when I noticed a few “stars” that aren’t part of the constellations I am familiar with. And we noticed them slightly strobing and moving, and then the movements got wilder and we saw that these weren’t single lights, but clusters of lights. They appeared triangle-ish, but we could make out as many as 9 stripes of light on two in particular. While watching we saw several lights appear and disappear without getting a chance to make out their shapes.

We also saw a plane pass overhead which gave us a comparison to know that these other objects were definitely not planes. The primary object seemed to be getting closer to us while maintaining it’s relative position against the visible stars in the sky. We couldn’t tell how far away it was, but it seemed like it was really only a mile or so above us. At first it had seemed like it was celestial, but as the light formation changed shape into a more triangular pattern, it looked to be near the top of the atmosphere and lowering. We have no fixed points by which to measure the distance, but we both had the same thought when the lights become more visible that perhaps we were looking at something that was a lot closer than we had initially thought.

I used my camera phone to try and see if I could capture an image or video, but nothing in the sky was reading on my phone. My wife has a professional Nikon D90 with a zoom lens and was also unable to see the objects through the lens finder. We started to notice that quite a few of these objects were moving but enough to be planes. They also seemed too high to be helicopters. It’s frustrating because they were perfectly clear to our naked eyes, but capturing lights in the sky on our phones was not happening.

When we came back to our rental, we looked online to see if there were any reports of UFO activity. I went back outside to our balcony and we saw two more of these triangular objects in the sky flying in erratic patterns. Mostly they hovered, then they went in straight-ish lines but then would sort-of bug out of pattern and continue. The original object was still hovering in place were I originally spotted it as we went outside to check on it after I started typing this.

An hour later it is now gone. My neck is sore from staring up, or I would have hung in there a bit longer. I was surprised that none of this was showing up online.

Posted 2016-05-20