NUFORC Sighting 90895

Occurred: 1997-07-04 23:00 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2012-07-15 09:41 Pacific
Duration: 30 seconds
No of observers: 3

Location: Washington, D.C., DC, USA

Shape: Other
Characteristics: Lights on object, Aura or haze around object

elongated and flattened 6"dome," with 1 bright light, hovers and darts like dragonfly, D.C. Mall, July 4th 1997

I've decided that I should finally share something that I and my friend and at least one other person saw over 10 years ago. It's something to add to your database so that it could perhaps be correlated to other incidents. Please note that I'm actually not certain that this happened on Independence Day 1997; it may have been Independence Day of 1996. But my friend and I have talked about this event many times since then, and we're 80 percent sure it was 1997.

I'm a D.C. metro area educated professional, in my mid 30's. I've long been interested in both aviation and astronomy, and know quite a bit about each. I'm generally a very skeptical, practical and evidence-oriented person, and until the moment of this sighting, I would not have given the UFO topic the time of day. But there were multiple witnesses to this event, so I can't simply dismiss it, and yet I also can't explain it in any conventional way.

My friend and I had been to the National Mall in Washington D.C. to view the 4th of July fireworks. We had taken the Metro rail into the city, were there at The Mall all day, watched the fireworks, and they had recently ended. We had not consumed any alcohol. The crowd there had been huge, obviously, so we waited a bit for the masses of people to thin out instead of trying to sardine ourselves onto a Metro car. This incident therefore must've occurred around 11p.m.

We were walking on the Mall on the eastern side of Washington Monument, headed west, toward the northern-most entrance to the Smithsonian Metro station. We were not far at all from the entrance, certainly within 100 feet, when we first saw this small object. We have always referred to it as the "dragonfly UFO" (Googling that phrase now, I see it has its own meaning in UFO circles. But what we saw looked nothing like that infamous hoax.) This object was to our left, slightly above eye-level, and I'm certain it was within 15 feet of us for this 30-second duration, and at several moments probably less than half that distance. It was about 6 inches at its longest, and it darted and hovered the way a dragonfly or hummingbird might, with extremely quick and abrupt stops and starts. Like gravity and inertia were barely an inconvenience. It would be hovering for a handful of seconds, and then in almost an instant it would zip over and be hovering several feet away. We saw this particular movement probably 5 or 6 times. The object was definitely intelligently controlled, as it seemed interested in the people in the area. It made no sound whatsoever, and given this thing's proximity to us we should have heard something. (Even considering the background noise.) It was just astounding to see.

The object consisted of two main parts: a very bright main light up above, and underneath that a handful of inches was a slightly illuminated, metallic-looking dome. Like a slightly flattened and elongated top half of a softball. But I'm less certain of that aspect, since it was hard to see past the object's upper main light. That light was a very bright, with a yellowish and brilliant glow, facing forward from what I perceived to be the object's front.

The most interesting feature of this object, to me -- what I could see since it was slightly lower than the 'body' (itself below the main light) -- was that there seemed to be two small, slightly yellow and luminescent areas of "haze" underneath the central area, the area where wings should've been. This haze reminded me of the heat that rises a few inches from black asphalt on a hot summer day, but it was more intense and turbulent -- finer, in a sense. These hazy areas were basically spherical and not very large -- maybe 2 or 3 inches -- sitting just below the body.

When the object left, about 30 seconds after we first saw it, it flew towards our front left (south to southwest) very rapidly, and in a basically flat trajectory. This would be towards what is now the Whitten Building. It left at a speed of probably 80-100 mph, but it reached this speed very quickly, in only a second or maybe slightly more. And one thing I specifically remember extremely clearly is that this object, when hovering and darting, did not have to yaw or turn in any way to accommodate the direction in which it was about to fly. Knowing aviation as I do, this struck me as particularly odd. So, standard fixed- or rotor-wing flight principles were not at work here. They just weren't.

This object clearly was not flying aerodynamically, or based on standard lift, and yet I'm confident it was intelligently controlled. Its near instantaneous stopping and starting, the lack of sound, the unique brilliance of the top light... it was amazing. As strange as it sounds and as! hard as it has been for me to come to terms with, I simply cannot imagine that this object was manufactured by humans.

I know that many people had to have seen this object that night. I'm amazed that I've not been able to find any similar reports.




NUFORC Note:

Witness indicates that the date of the sighting is approximate. PD


Posted 2012-08-05

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