NUFORC Sighting 106237

Occurred: 2014-01-06 03:45 Local
Reported: 2014-01-12 17:50 Pacific
Duration: 40 minutes
No of observers: 1

Location: Jackson, MI, USA

Shape: Unknown
Characteristics: Lights on object

Object originally thought to be airplane skipped half of the sky while surrounded my columns of light.

I am from Horton, Michigan, just south of Jackson, Michigan. Last weekend I saw something that I will never ever forget. It was the night (or morning rather) of the huge snow storm, January 5, 2014. I am a security guard and was stationed at Tenneco in Grass Lake, Michigan until 11:00pm. At 10:40pm my relief called to tell me that he was stuck and was unable to get to work. I offered to come pull him out with my 4x4 F-150, but I also got stuck. We made it back to our work and were going to wait it out when I found someone to pull my truck out. After getting un-stuck, I got on I-94 via exit 150 heading west towards my house. I realized that it was 3:45 am (January 6, 2014 at this point) and that Coast to Coast was on, so I turned on the radio and started to listen.

After a few minutes of driving, and after passing exit 145, I noticed that I could see what I can only describe as columns of light in the sky. At first I just saw one, and thought it was a spot light. But then I notice a couple of others. It seemed strange and being that I was listening to Coast to Coast, my mind was open to all sorts of possibilities and I paid attention to every detail. They didn’t seem to start from the sky nor from the ground, they were just there. The light was not super bright, which is why I did not notice it at first. There were nine of them, spaced equally apart, the same distance from me, and all the same brightness, surrounding me in a semi-circle. There may have been some behind me, but I didn’t turn around to look because I was driving in dangerous weather. Anyways, the columns of light were like perfect cylinders, the same width throughout. I couldn’t tell how far away or how wide they were.

This is when it got even stranger. Since it was still snowing, the sky was rather dark, although I could see a few stars through a couple breaks in the clouds. I noticed a peculiar star and I realized that it wasn’t a star but a plane, because the light started blinking (as lights on planes do). I watched it travel across the sky when all of a sudden it seemed to skip the whole horizon. It started on my right (I saw it through the very right side of the windshield) and I watched it blink about five or six times and then stopped blinking for one or two seconds and all of a sudden was way to left (outside of the driver’s side window) and continued to blink. The whole time this was happening, I could still see the beams of light. I could see them for the whole drive home, about 35 minutes, until I turned off of the highway and started driving on back-roads through the country where the trees were blocking my view.

Posted 2014-01-16