NUFORC Sighting 136538

Occurred: 2017-10-04 06:10 Local
Reported: 2017-10-04 07:33 Pacific
Duration: 3 minutes
No of observers: 2

Location: Knox, PA, USA

Shape: Light
Characteristics: Lights on object

Lights in the southern sky which move, pause, and change direction.

On 10-04-17, my daughter and I saw some strange lights in the sky and couldn't figure them out. My daughter and I are both adults who enjoy watching the sky at night. We are both detail oriented and I am a voracious reader.

At approximately 6:10 AM, we were sitting on our covered patio. It was still dark, the sky was clear, and stars were very visible. The outside temperature was 51 degrees F. We noticed a very bright "star" stationary in the southern sky and our first thought was that the north star should not be in the southern sky. We located the north star, right where it should have been. We then realized that the light in the sky was much brighter than the north star.

We noticed that the light had begun moving in a westerly direction. We have a lot of air traffic in our area, so we're familiar with the speed airliner lights appear to move in the night sky. This light was moving faster than an airliner.

All of a sudden the bright light winked out. A few seconds later there were red and white blinking lights where the bright light had been. The lights would move west, pause for a second or two, then move west again. The lights paused and moved west 5 times. After the final pause, the lights then began moving straight up. They stopped long enough to blink twice, then began moving east at an even faster rate than the bright light had moved. We followed the blinking lights for nearly a minute, then they disappeared.

We have witnessed strange lights in the southern sky on several occasions over the last few years. I finally decided to see if there could be an explanation for them.

Summer of 2013, around the 4th of July, about 10 PM, I was on our patio, when I saw a bright light in the southern sky arc from the treeline. It reached what would have been the apex of the arc and simply winked out. Two seconds later another bright light followed the same trajectory from the treeline to the apex and winked out. Two seconds after that a third bright light followed the same path as the other two and winked out.

Initially, since it was fireworks season, I assumed they were just fireworks. Then I realized that there was no noise, no flash, nothing. The lights just winked out. The lights were puzzling because fireworks, by their very nature, cannot maintain such precise trajectories, especially along an identical path.

Posted 2017-10-05