NUFORC Sighting 159820

Occurred: 2020-10-07 19:35 Local
Reported: 2020-10-08 01:14 Pacific
Duration: unsure

Location: Terre Haute, IN, USA

Shape: Light
Characteristics: Lights on object, Left a trail, Emitted other objects

Four points of light appeared one after the other, one with a quickly-disappearing light trail, half an hour before nightfall.

I am a 22-year-old white female college student studying English and Creative Writing. (Hopefully any talent I have in the field will aid in this description.) I wouldn’t exactly call myself a conspiracy theorist, but I am openly receptive to the idea that there are things among us that we don’t understand. I don’t know if this is pertinent, but I have a background of depression and anxiety, though I was experiencing neither during this event. (Up until I saw the UFO. Then, I will admit, I was very anxious.) At approximately 19:30 on October 9, 2020, I was sitting alone in my car in a McDonald’s drive-thru on the north side of Terre Haute, Indiana. The sun was setting, but it was still bright out; the sky was a pastel pink. As I waited for the cars ahead of me to move on, I noticed what looked to be two stars hovering in the west—the direction that I was facing. They were bright white pinpricks of light contrasted against the sky. It’s hard to say the shape, simply because they seemed so far away. Upon closer inspection, I could see that at least one of them had a short trail, and in an attempt to reconcile the strange object, I told myself it must be a couple of planes, despite the fact that planes do not emit light in that way.

(The trail was odd looking, too. Not smoke, but it appeared to be made of light.) The drive-thru line was not long, but long enough for me to stare for a minute or two. Long enough to have noticed any movement, or a direction in which the “planes” were heading, if there was any. But they simply hovered, completely still. The trail that had been left by the one had dissipated in a matter of moments. I pulled out my cell phone and attempted to take pictures, but the points of light were too small for my camera to pick up. At this point, I suspected that it might be a UFO, but had other explanations to put myself at ease, as well. I knew that Mars and Venus were supposed to be bright this month—perhaps that was all I was seeing.

However, as I was focused on the original two points of light, two more appeared. I first noticed the third, and then as my gaze shifted, a fourth. All close together, and all unwaveringly still. I distractedly pulled forward to the pickup window, and accepted my bag of food before pulling out of the parking lot and heading home.

I took Fort Harrison Rd west toward 13th St and continued to anxiously watch the points of light (what I even now struggle to call UFOs) as I drove. So intent on watching them in fact, needing to track any movement and at this point terrified of what it might mean, I was not as focused on the road as I should have been. I made it back to my home in one piece, but only after I told myself to look away and pay attention to what I was doing. I wanted to look around at the other drivers on the road, to see if they were reacting the same way, if they even noticed, but my mind was scattered, and I was far too anxious to do anything but race home.

The moment I arrived back at my house, I headed to the back yard to get a clearer view of the sky, but there were too many trees blocking my view, so I went back in. Sat down. Feverishly Googled what it could be, and found with a blossoming dread that it couldn’t be Mars and Venus. Not only are those planets located in different quadrants of the sky, but are visible only at different times of the day. Perhaps one of the lights I saw was Mars, but that doesn’t explain the other three.

Later that night, I did further research, and was momentarily relieved to find there would be a meteor shower that same night, but the details about the meteor shower didn’t line up with what I saw. According to a local news site, the Draconid meteor shower is small, and one should only expect to “see a few meteors streak across the sky in an hour.” And though the Draconid meteors move slower than those in other showers, they only last “one or two seconds,” which does not account for the several minutes that these UFOs were in my line of sight.

And these could not be stars. Even neglecting the fact that one of them had a trail, nowhere within city limits could you see stars shining that brightly, especially before nightfall. Truly, I would like for there to be some other explanation. But the more I go over the memory of what I saw, the more I’m convinced that the only logical explanation is UFOs. I relayed this experience to a trusted friend who used to live in Arizona, a well-known hub for UFO activity, and she told me that my description matches that of her own experiences. I did a few different Google searches to see if anyone had reported anything similar, but I came up empty-handed. So I decided I had to do it myself, even though thinking about it fills me with that same dread as before.

I don’t think I’ll be getting any sleep tonight.

Posted 2020-12-23