NUFORC Sighting 161965

Occurred: 2016-07-10 21:00 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2021-02-08 03:29 Pacific
Duration: 10 minutes
No of observers: 6

Location: Greenwood Lake, NY, USA

Shape: Formation
Characteristics: Lights on object, Changed Colo

Mysterious three object formation over Greenwood Lake, NY plus a fourth strange object

In July of 2016, my girlfriend and I were invited to our friends' house on Greenwood Lake, a nine mile long lake in Orange County, NY.

My friends' house is right on the lake, with a large deck overlooking it. This was probably our tenth dinner invitation at their home. Another couple was there as well. Dinner was on the deck as usual. After sundown, the sky was fabulous. Fifty miles away from the lights of NYC there's very little light pollution so it's a great place to watch the cosmos. This night was clear without a cloud in the sky.

One of my friends' guests and I talked about the amazing sky over the lake and about constellations. I told him I didn't know much about them but I had a Sky app on my iPad. I gave him my iPad and went back to the discussion on 1950s be-bop or something.

About ten minutes later he asked me what that constellation was. He pointed over the horizon across the lake. I spotted it, took the iPad and pointed it at the three bright stars he indicated and didn't find it either. I said it was just three stars so it might not be a constellation at all. Maybe that's why it didn't make the app.

"But they're moving!" I looked again and, sure enough, they were, albeit very slowly. They were moving due west and they were moving independent of each other. They had a roughly triangular formation, with a “lead” object but they seemed to be moving at different and varying speeds relative to one another. They were bright, solid white, showed no navigation beacons and made no sound. I couldn't tell how high they were but a passenger jet heading due north, probably flying a polar route to Asia, flew into view and I could tell by its size that it was flying at at least 30,000 feet. It flew under these lights.

At this point, dinner party conversation ceased as all six pairs of eyes were glued to what we were witnessing. All I heard were murmured comments like “Are they... drones?” and “Do you hear anything?” It was evident by now, even to our hosts who had lived for 40 years on that lake and seen hundreds of meteor shows, that this wasn’t a normal celestial event. The lights were stopping and starting which means they could hover and no rotary wing aircraft flies that high. So they definitely weren't helicopters and they weren't drones. Maybe they were weather balloons and the light was actually the sun over the horizon reflecting off their mylar skins? But these balloons were moving due west, which is contrary to the jet stream. I also knew from my recently-deceased older brother who was president of an amateur ballooning club in Colorado that they no longer used mylar for balloons. Mylar used to be used to bounce radar signals off a balloon to track its position but modern balloons carry their own telemetry now. My brother used to build them.

So they weren't aircraft and they weren't balloons. Someone said "ball lightning?" I didn’t know but I did look it up later. Ball lightning is plasma and usually associated with the highly charged air around thunderstorms and the sky was clear with no storms forecast. I saw ball lightning when I was a kid but I'd never heard of ball lighting being this high or lasting this long. We had been watching this for over five minutes.

Suddenly my girlfriend exclaimed, "Look at that!" She pointed to the horizon across the lake where we'd first seen these lights but this one light was very low to the ground. Everybody gasped because it was so much closer and it glowed bright red, like a Roman candle. It definitely wasn’t a conventional aircraft. She said she saw it come up from behind a low mountain about two miles away. I saw it hovering over the mountain. Then it shot straight up, stopped for about 15 seconds around 2500 feet AGL and hovered again. Then it slowly moved north about what I estimated at that distance might be a half mile. It hovered again. I looked back at the three lights and saw that they had suddenly turned due north. The red object shot up at extremely high speed and in the direction of the three lights. By “high speed” I mean that it disappeared into the noise of the star canopy in less than two seconds. When I looked back at the three-light formation it had also disappeared.

I’m not a believer in space alien visitations. I’m not even a believer in secret government technology as advanced as what I saw. I’m still not. I'm not saying what I, rather we, saw. I have no idea what it was. I just know what it wasn't, which was anything familiar to me and I'm an aircraft junkie. I think the rapid movements of the last object I saw would have killed a human occupant.

No, there were no pharmaceuticals at the party and drinking was light and social because most of us were driving home on those dark, deer-infested back roads. We’ve since spoken with each other about this event only a couple of times but I know my hosts are uncomfortable with the subject, as if they were subjected to a mass psychosis event and don’t want to be regarded as public kooks.

I told my brother what I'd seen. He used to be a Navy fighter jock (A4s) during the Vietnam War. He told me about a mysterious three-light formation he'd seen over the Spratly Islands in the early 1970s when he was stationed at Cubi Point in the Philippines. What he described was almost identical to what we saw. What was remarkable was that he never told me about it until I brought it up, as if he too was embarrassed by it. He never filed the sighting in an official report either but told me that lots of pilots had seen stuff like this on night flights. You didn’t report it unless you wanted to be grounded.

Posted 2021-03-02