NUFORC Sighting 166394

Occurred: 1994-06-22 21:00 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2022-01-25 20:08 Pacific
Duration: 5-7 minutes
No of observers: 3

Location: Panther Creek State Park, close to Morristown, Tennessee, TN, USA
Location details: Camping area of Panther Creek State Park

Shape: Sphere

Small, softball size glowing red light moving fast, slow, and sometimes not at all.

Set up camp and waited for friends to join us. I decided to walk down to the bathhouse where there was a payphone to call them. It was very dark outside and extremely foggy. I had to hold the flashlight down at my feet to see where I was going because the light did not penetrate the night fog. We had been to this campground many times so I knew the way. I was watching where my feet were going and nothing else. When I did look up, I was about 50 yards from the bathhouse, I noticed a small red light that I estimated to be about 100 yards from me. It was across the field and at the edge of the woods. I thought it was a car tail light and thought this was very strange because there was not a road there. It appeared bright and clear even through the fog. I could also see the bathhouse floodlights but they were very dimmed by the fog. The bathhouse was straight ahead and the red light was to my right. I turned the flashlight off and continued toward the bathhouse. When I was about 10 feet from the bathhouse entrance I looked back toward the red light to see if I could make out a road where the red light was. I noticed the light had moved down to the middle of the field in front of the woods where I was certain there was no road. The light had moved much closer to me. I started running toward the bathhouse and looked back at the light which was now at the edge of the field and the path I was on. It had to have moved very quickly to cover this territory, about 75 yards, and I hadn't run more than two steps. I became very frightened and started to run into the bathhouse when I heard my husband yell to me to wait up. He had our four-year-old daughter with him. I yelled back at him to run to the bathhouse and pointed at the light. The light was not moving from the edge of the path. My husband started to run toward the light and I started running toward our daughter. The light moved very quickly left and right and all the time maintained its position of about four or five feet off the ground. Before I could reach my daughter the light moved toward her and circled her once at which time my husband started running toward the light. The light, again extremely fast, moved about twenty feet away from us. My husband started running toward it again. The light stayed still until my husband was no more than five feet from it. Then it moved quickly back to the other side of the path and stopped again. My husband started toward it again, and again when he was about five feet away it crossed the path again and stopped. My husband started to run toward it again and it quickly crossed the path again and then, within a blink it took off across the field and up into the sky and disappeared. I had never heard of anything like this before, but a few weeks later, I saw a TV clip of two county law officers in southern Virginia that were driving on a desolated mountain road and encountered the same thing. They saw the red light coming down from the top of the mountain and toward them. Their dash camera was on with audio and video. It recorded the officers getting out of their patrol car and standing in front of their vehicle pointing toward the light and yelling at each other. The light very quickly moved down the mountain and toward them. They jumped into their vehicle and the light circled their car and then immediately, very, very, fast, took off into the sky. I have not heard of another sighting of this kind since then.

Posted 2022-03-04