NUFORC Sighting 34390

Occurred: 2004-01-09 19:48 Local
Reported: 2004-01-10 16:57 Pacific
Duration: 7-10 minutes
No of observers: 9

Location: Butte, MT, USA

Shape: Formation

Unusual formation of lights entrances witnesses

At approximately 1948 on Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, my youngest son (15 years) came back into an establishment where I was visiting with my fiancée and a couple of co-workers. My son asked that I go outside to see "something". On leaving the building I saw my two other sons' and my oldest son's girlfriend looking skyward. The place we were at is near the airport and I expected to see some type of aircraft or such. Instead, as I looked up at about a 45 degree angle, I saw a group of lights, reddish yellow in color, moving east to west at what appeared to be high altitude and fairly high speed. The apparent "flight" path was east to west (after closer thought, more southeast to northwest), with the majority of the objects moving in random directions within the "flow" of the group, while others followed a more orderly flight formation of two parallel "lines" appearing at arms length to start at about 18 inches wide and maybe an inch separation expanding to maybe 3 feet wide and two inches deep at the end of the sighting (approximately 5- 7 minutes for myself).The random flying objects demonstrated high speed arcing turns, high speed right angle turns, circles and "wiggling" flight. After watching for a couple minutes or so, I grabbed a pair of 7 x 50 binoculars from my vehicle and found that I could not see any detail, just star sized lights moving. Again, the objects were reddish-yellow, perhaps no brighter than other stars and visible due to their movement. They did not display navigation lights nor leave a contrail. As such, there were no contrails visible in this area of the sky during the time these objects were visible, however, quite a distance south near the southern visible horizon aircraft navigation lights could be clearly seen. The area of town we were in is a commercial district near the local airport and well lighted, however stars are easily visible during the night After watching for a few more minutes I returned inside the business and asked my fiancée to step outside on the other side of the building to see if she saw the same thing. Joining her was a co-worker of mine and three other patrons, who immediately saw the same series of objects. The general consensus was’ "this is weird, I wonder what they are?" My interest was much higher as I am familiar with high performance military aircraft flight characteristics. These objects definitely outperformed any aircraft that I have seen or can imagine.

After spending about two minutes viewing the objects from this vantage point the group moved back indoors as the outside temperature was around 8 °F. The sky was clear with some ice crystals visible in the glare of the street lights.

I then walked back to the location where my sons were. We continued to watch for maybe a minute at which time an aircraft departed the airport and the objects looked as though they were forming one large, tight group. We watched the plane for a few moments and noticed that the objects were no longer visible.

I do not believe that we saw reflections, birds, ice crystals, weather balloons or conventional aircraft. My family and I have viewed satellites many times and are familiar with satellite flight characteristics. The apparent coordination of the 28+ objects astounded all observers around me.

Any information related to these objects would interest me greatly.

NUFORC Note:

We spoke with this witness, and we believed his story to be sincere. However, despite repeated requests, we have not received any other reports from the other witnesses. We have no way of knowing whether this is a sincere report, but we would welcome reports from any other witnesses. PD

Posted 2004-01-17