NUFORC Sighting 137017

Occurred: 2017-10-23 20:30 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2017-10-28 11:37 Pacific
Duration: 20-30 minutes
No of observers: 3

Location: Mountain Home AFB, ID, USA

Shape: Light
Characteristics: Lights on object

Bright orange lights near Mountain Home AFB

I work on the flight line at Mountain Home AFB. We constantly have planes taking off and doing exercises at night. I am familiar with how they come in to land, the patterns they do, coloring of the lights, etc.

On this particular night I was working on multiple aircraft and as I'm walking to one of them I noticed a bright orange light coming from the South West, which is directly in line with our runway. I don't particularly remember any of our jets going up prior to seeing the light but could possibly be a cargo aircraft. Normally our jets have bright white lights, but since this light was orange, I assumed it wasn't one of ours, or the bulb was just old and needed to be replaced. It didn't appear to be moving but normally their approach is pretty far so it could have been descending at a slow rate.

Thinking nothing else of it, I continued to work on the aircraft for about 5-10 minutes and noticed the light was still there in the exact same spot. Perhaps maybe it made a go-around, but it never passed over the base to make a pattern like they normally do if they miss the approach or practice. The light stayed there for about 2 minutes after looking at it then disappeared. I told my other co-workers and they saw the light too, but jokingly played it off that they were aliens. About 5 minutes later the light appeared again but this time there were multiple smaller orange lights in a formation to the left of the larger light, in the exact same spot again. I couldn't tell if the smaller lights were all individual craft or part of a larger one. None of them appeared to be moving.

I thought maybe they could be flares and they're just just practicing but it made no sense that 1, the lights all were the same color, 2. why would they pop flares while on approach to land? and 3. flares die out after about 5-10 seconds but these stayed eliminated for another 2-3 minutes. Then they all disappeared. This repeated 3 more times until it stopped. Nothing ever landed later that night, and found out later none of the squadrons were flying at that time. The light was bright enough at times I thought it was coming right towards us but it never moved from that single spot. There are no other larger airports around that can support aircraft with large lights like the ones I saw, except for 40 miles north west in Boise.

Can't guarantee what I saw is concrete evidence of extraterrestrial objects but they were definitely out of the ordinary and I haven't seen the lights prior or after the incident. Normally jets practice in the same areas and do the same patterns for about a week or so so all the pilots can practice at it since we have multiple day/night shifts. Was really strange.




NUFORC Note:

Source of report indicates that the date of the sighting is approximate. PD


Posted 2017-11-03

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