NUFORC Sighting 175340

Occurred: 2023-04-12 01:20 Local
Reported: 2023-04-14 20:57 Pacific
Duration: 4.5 hrs (until 5:40am)
No of observers: 2

Location: Boulder, CO, USA
Location details: Old North Boulder, third floor apt., North-facing window

Shape: Unknown
Characteristics: Aura or haze around object

Saw bright white lights followed by a dimmer light that moved erratically and sometimes very quickly while staying aloft for 4+ hrs

Night of Tuesday 4/11, early morning Wednesday 4/12

(Clear night after the first very warm day of the spring here. Very little cloud cover; clear enough that several stars were visible throughout the night. I have tall windows and can see a great deal of open sky, looking north mostly across a large parking lot, with my view of the sky blocked only by one other building, a few trees, and the foothills off to the west.)

At approximately 1:20am, while seated at my desk in front of my north-facing, third-floor window in North Boulder, a bright spot of white light caught my eye. Fairly high in the sky, it lasted for about five seconds before moving straight horizontally to the right (a short distance from my vantage point), with the light dissipating as it moved until it faded out completely within the span of about a second. Light was much brighter than any other object in the sky at the time. (Throughout the night, small planes were visible periodically.) Very hard to discern distance.

Roughly 10 minutes later, I saw the same thing again, lower down in the sky. Similarly bright, it repeated the pattern, staying stationary for a moment and then fading out quickly as it began to move horizontally (this time to the left). Like the first time, this was so brief that I didn’t have time to try to capture any images or video.

Another ~10 minutes later, this happened a third time, even lower down (barely above the line of trees and buildings across the long parking lot I face out of my window). Same level of brightness, still impossible to discern distance. This time it disappeared to the right and my line of sight was broken by trees and buildings. Unlike the previous times, a few seconds after it disappeared I clocked another source of light that seemed to have just appeared. This was the next phase:

1:42am: A faint but distinct light was apparent on the right side of my field of view, much dimmer than the previous three lights, roughly as bright as a star in my perception. I immediately noticed that it was moving upwards and to the right, relatively slowly. My first thought was that it was an airplane, but it was an unblinking white light so this seemed unlikely. My next thought was either a helicopter or a drone, until about five-ten seconds into my observation of its flight, at which point it took a sudden, V-shaped turn back down and to the left. My hackles were already raised from the oddness of the previous lights but this motion struck me as very unusual and I was a little alarmed. (I have a time stamp for this moment because I attempted to take a video of the sky but had no luck; there’s some light pollution from the neighboring buildings and parking lots and my iPhone SE struggled to capture anything as dim as this light.) The object continued to move over a fairly large area of the sky, still staying to the right end of my view (thus north-northeast from me), for approximately the next 10 minutes. Its motion varied considerably and struck me as odd at several different times, alternating between different kinds of patterns:

- It would move slowly, straight in one direction or arcing slightly, coming to a stop occasionally
- It would move in a way that reminded me of an insect, which is to say flying in meandering, looping motions, or bobbing up and down. Sometimes the loops were tight and fast, sometimes slower and stretched out over more space
- It would move in more jagged patterns that reminded me of the way you might play with a laser pointer or scribble to test a pen: fast swooping motions alternating with turns on tight, acute angles as it switched directions, albeit performed much more slowly. Turns were often very acute and seemed to take no effort at all; it seemed to be able to switch direction more or less instantaneously with no concern for momentum
- It would move in fits and starts, moving jerkily, quickly and then slowly, between stops
- It would make repeated “bouncing” movements, either moving quickly right and left or up and down

~2:00am: After nearly 20 minutes of this unusual movement, the object took a swooping turn and started moving left (west). This started at a normal speed (relative to what I'd observed), and then it accelerated over the course of about a second before moving extremely quickly off to the left and out of my line of sight. I cannot overemphasize the speed that I’m talking about - until this point, it still seemed plausible to me that this might be a commercial drone despite the odd angles of its movement, but this was unbelievably fast - it shot off at a speed that no drone I’m familiar with could plausibly hit, let alone that quickly. This was so unusual that I had a strong visceral reaction to it.

2:02am: I quickly scanned the sky once it disappeared out of view and almost immediately took notice of another object in a slightly different part of the sky (higher up and due north from me rather than north-northeast) - it was of identical brightness to the previous object as far as I could discern and it occurred to me that it was likely the same object, but there’s no way to say for certain. (I have a precise time stamp here because I began to record another video, also fruitless visually, but in which I narrate back the events of the past hour, which has helped me put together a timeline.) About thirty seconds into my observation, an extremely bright object flashed through the sky, to the left of this object, going north - this looked instinctively like a shooting star, which it may have been, but it appeared significantly lower and closer than shooting stars I’ve seen previously in the area. I perceived red/blue light around it in the brief moment I could see it. The main object was still there, and this began a very long phase in which it stayed there until the sun came up.

To reiterate before this next phase: I proceeded to observe this object (which may or may not have been the same one that zoomed off) from at least 2:02am until roughly 5:40am, unbroken except for my occasional, hasty trips to the bathroom or for more water. It was in the same area of the sky, moving on a smaller scale than the object I'd seen previously, for at least three and a half hours.

2:03am - 5:05am: I’m going to summarize the events of these few hours with highlights but without precise time stamps; at some point I stopped recording videos, having had no luck, and stopped recording voice memos as what I was observing became somewhat repetitive (with notable exceptions). For the entirety of this chunk of time, the object moved in the same assortment of patterns that I’ve described above from the previous (possibly same) object: swooping turns; tight, angular turns; tight loops; bouncing back and forth or up and down. This covered a smaller area of the sky - it’s impossible to say if it was covering similar distances and was simply further away, as the brightness appeared to be the same but I have no frame of reference for the distance. Notable things in this period:

- At one point there were two other, brighter objects visible towards the bottom right of my field of view. These were not quite as bright as the lights I saw at the beginning of the night but were closer to the brightness of those than to the relative dimness of the main object I was tracking. I did not see these move erratically so it’s entirely possible that these were in fact drones or something mundane, but their brightness struck me as unusual. One light reappeared multiple times and then a second appeared with it on one occasion, the two of them moving seemingly at the same speed and in parallel locked trajectories until they left my FOV. At another point I did perceive another object of similar brightness and type of movement to the main object, further to the left of my FOV (north-northwest), which moved across the sky to the right of the main object before I lost track of it visually. (I am more confident of the oddness of this object than of the brighter ones, so I’m including it in my incident craft count of 2.) There were moments where I thought there was other movement in my peripheral vision but I was almost obsessively fixated on the main object and did not do much observation of the rest of the sky for fear of missing another unusual movement.

- Probably two hours into my observation, the main object went stationary for a moment and then I could see a sort of aura of white light pulsating around it. I momentarily waved this off to my tired eyes but after observing longer I was quite certain: it reminded me of the pulsating “sleep” light on older MacBooks, a soft white glow fading on and then off over the course of roughly three or four seconds. This “pulse” happened maybe five or six times consecutively before stopping. Although the light was white, sometimes there seemed to be a kind of red and/or blue sheen to it; it’s very hard to say what might be the distortion of observing through a glass window and a window screen, but at this point and several other points there appeared to be a sort of shimmery quality to the light and it was sometimes difficult to keep my eyes entirely focused on the object.

- The biggest deviation to the movement patterns I’d seen before was when the object appeared to “jump” on two occasions, by which I mean moving so quickly to another nearby point that I didn’t perceive any movement between the two. The unusual quality of this movement struck me as very distinct.

5:05 - ~5:40am: At this point the object had been moving in the same patterns and in the same patch of sky for fully three hours, unbroken, when my fiancée got up for work. (I had stayed up all night at this point, coming off of a dinnertime shift - I was so rapt that I genuinely could not look away.) I called her into the second bedroom where I’d been doing this observation and she immediately saw the object as well when I pointed out the area of the sky in which it had been moving. She can corroborate all of the movement patterns I’ve described above, as well as the “jumping” phenomenon wherein it seemed to simply reappear somewhere nearby without visible movement. She kept describing a “bouncing” movement, which was the short movements up and down that I’d seen previously. She also noted a faint aura of light occasionally visible around it. I continued my observation as she got ready for work, popping in and out and continuing to observe when she could.

As the sun began to rise, the object remained in the same part of the sky. Light filtered in gradually, the stars faded from view, and the object remained, becoming progressively harder and harder to track visually as the light increased. The light coming off of the object began to flicker increasingly; my fiancée and I were both a little confused as to whether the light we’d been observing was actually something produced by the object (as the pulsating aura almost certainly was) or if it was in fact a reflection of the moon off of a highly reflective surface. In the few minutes before it faded from view, we both began to feel as though we could make out the shape a little more clearly, and it did not appear circular like I’d assumed of the dot of light I’d been tracking all night: both of us noted an angularity to the object. This also suggested that it perhaps wasn’t as far as it had appeared initially if we were able to make out even a rough shape (or was larger than I’d imagined if it were indeed fairly far), although it remained very difficult to discern the distance and size of the object. My final visual impression as more light hit it was that the object had at least one sharp angle in its form and looked possibly metallic or highly reflective. At around 5:40am, at which point the object was already barely perceptible, I stepped out of the room and when I returned I was no longer able to see the object. No way to say whether it had moved or had simply become imperceptible in the daylight.

Posted 2023-05-19