NUFORC Sighting 29526

Occurred: 2001-08-29 15:45 Local
Reported: 2003-07-03 17:19 Pacific
Duration: 20-30 minutes
No of observers: 15

Location: Oil City, PA, USA

Shape: Changing
Characteristics: Aircraft nearby

20 minute sighting of balloon-like objects in broad daylight by at leat 15 witnessess

A beautiful clear blue summer sky with a couple of low, small, white, puffy, clouds was the background for an unusual sighting of unnatural objects. I was sitting in the playground in front of my apartment about 3:00 one August afternoon, while two of my children played with several neighbor children on the playground. Several adults were there, including the supervisor of the apartment complex and a contractor, who were working on plans for redesigning the playground. I called the children's attention to what I thought were parachuters coming down. The adults heard me and also watched the objects. This event was unusual in itself because there was no airport nearby and the terrain was a river valley surrounded by wooded hills. There were 4 white shapes moving in a downward, irregular, floating pattern.

There were several jets passing by very high in the sky at the time. We lived in a busy flight path area, with jets passing overhead very high, very frequently. At the time I thought that these "parachuters" had come from one of these very high jets. Another thing that struck me as very unusual, because I thought parachuters leapt from airplanes, not jets. The jets were too high to see clearly, but the jet trails were clearly visible.

As we watched for several minutes, waiting to see where they might land, I thought that the behavior of these "parachuters" was unusual. First, the area I lived in was heavily forested and sparsely populated, so nearby landing areas were not numerous. But then as we continued to watch, some of the objects stopped descending. This in itself could have been explained by the use of what I refer to as "half parachutes", the type used for stunt skydiving, but they seemed to hang in the air longer than you would expect, even of those types of parachutes.

The kids lost interest after a few minutes and went back to playing. I kept observing the objects, because I was struck by what I saw as inconsistencies in the behavior of these things. As I observed the objects seemed to change shape. When they were higher up, it seemed the motion was of a "half parachute" with someone swinging on the end of the ropes and causing the parachute to move in irregular motion. As the objects descended lower, they looked more like huge white balloon type objects, changing shape, and moving as though tumbling end over end as we watched. As though they were not completely filled and something was moving about inside the objects. At first all the objects could be seen together, but as they descended, they spread out to different areas of the sky. When I saw that these objects were clearly not parachutes, I though they might be balloons. But the "balloons" changed shape and were too big for regular helium balloons. And they did not act like you would expect from balloons that everyone has seen let loose by kids and soaring off out of sight. These "balloony things" clearly did not act like that. First they came down from very high and then stopped and some started moving up. One drifted over under one of the puffy low clouds, and one went behind one and disappeared, then reappeared drifting off to the north, another went near a different cloud and stayed under it as the cloud slowly drifted to the south. The last object drifted off to the south. By this time I thought we were seeing some kind of UFO and called the attention of the adults and children to look up in the sky at the "UFO's". As I was watching them, I saw about 25 white dots that came out of an area of the sky high above us radiating out in straight lines from a center area and I yelled out, look there's more! Several people looked up as these objects then started disappearing and moving erratically back up into the sky, but I was convinced we were seeing something unusual. All of these that had appeared later soon! could no longer be seen. I watched one of the lower ones that had been there before the appearance of the others, drift over the top of the roof of the apartment, so I went in the backyard to see where it went. It was just a round sort of shiny looking balloon like thing hanging in the air and moving slowly to the south. I called one of my children outside to look at it. As it slowly drifted further away, it started looking more like a star, shining brightly in the daytime and we both watched it until it moved out of our view over the treetops. The whole duration of this "sighting" was about twenty minutes or more by numerous adults and children. Nothing was reported on the local news that day of anything unusual.

NUFORC Note:

We are grateful for the nice report from this witness. We will invite her to contact the other witnesses and have reports submitted by the others who observed the evnet. PD

Posted 2003-07-16