NUFORC Sighting 70548

Occurred: 2009-06-17 22:00 Local
Reported: 2009-06-17 22:48 Pacific
Duration: 10 minutes
No of observers: 2

Location: Salem, OR, USA

Shape: Chevron
Characteristics: Lights on object, Emitted other objects, Changed Color, Aircraft nearby

Vague chevron object with strange colored lights and erratic movement seen, with smaller lights/objects emitted from it as it traveled.

I was looking up at the stars, which I could see clearly (this tends to be unusual with our normally cloudy skies), and I suddenly saw a bright starlike light (white with reddish around edges)which faded quickly as it moved slow about 2 inches toward the north. I thought this was a shooting star or something. Then another bright starlike light shone to just the east of it, but this one started shooting around wildly like a binball machine, erratic and quickly with no discernable pattern and at extreme angles, but completely unlike a plane possibly could, within about a 5 in radius (from my perspective).

Then this light headed southward at a more steady pace, and as it went I could see several lights blinking quickly in different colors - red, white, blue, green - but these lights blinked randomly and all around a two inch-long object that I could just vaguely see (It seemed very high up). At one point they almost seemed to light up rapidly in a 'band' across the width of the object. It looked slightly grey against the deep blue sky, and it appeared to have an elongated point at it's head and possibly two shorter points at its end with a concave bottom - possibly chevron shaped (it may have had more points to it, but it was very unclear). All the blinking lights were no bigger than most of the stars around the sky.

As it headed south overhead it traveled about the speed of a plane way high up, but it kept blinking these colored lights in a random effect all over the face of it. Then smaller white lights began shooting away from it one & two at a time in all directions, going away up to about 5-6 inches. It still had a main white light, brighter than the rest, which continued to blink at erratic but consistent intervals. We watched it do this until it was very far south, to the distant tree line. Small lights continually came off from it, although they were very hard to see once it had reached that far away.

About 10 minutes later, the lights of what looked to be a regular airplane, with one white light & one red flashing at regular & consistent intervals, crossed the sky in the same path and disappeared at the same point beyond the trees.

Posted 2009-08-05