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Strange Lights In The Sky

Old_Shoe

Devoted Cultist
Joined
Feb 7, 2013
Messages
144
It was the late 90's or early 2000's that this happened. My parents lived in Port Charlotte, Florida, then. I was visiting them and we did an overnight trip on their 30' sailboat on Charlotte Harbor (or, Harbour, for our Brit friends ;) ).
We sailed down to the opening between Charlotte Harbor and the Gulf of Mexico and in the evening we anchored in a little cove of Punta Blanca Island at Cayo Costa State Park. We cooked up some supper and watched the sun set. Later that evening my dad and I sat relaxing in the cockpit sipping some Scotch. My mom went below and hit the rack early.

It was a beautiful starry night and we were just quietly talking when my dad suddenly said, "Hey, look at that"! I looked where he was pointing and we both watched two very bright orange lights hovering in the sky over Port Boca Grande. They looked like they were about 2000' altitude and as we watched they did a sort of very slow dance around each other. This went on for about 10 minutes or so, and as we watched them we could see farther out over the gulf and from farther away an airplane approaching the area from the north. The airplane went past our little area and arced around for a landing at the RSW airport. The orange lights just stayed in one spot while that happened, but they eventually began fading and disappeared, and suddenly red strobe lights appeared and they began moving southeast towards where we were anchored. We kept an eye on them and they flew almost directly over us. We estimated altitude at a couple thousand feet and airspeed maybe about 80 to 100 mph. We strained our ears listening and couldn't hear any sound from them at all. They tracked off in a southeasterly direction and eventually disappeared in the distance.

Well that was a pretty unusual thing to see and naturally we sat in the cockpit trying to figure out what it was we might've seen. The best we could come up with was that they were helicopters, but we'd never heard of silent helicopters. Maybe a half hour after that happened we suddenly noticed ANOTHER bright orange light hovering over Port Boca Grande. It did pretty much the same thing that we watched before in that it hovered there about 10 minutes. During the time it was hovering we noticed an aircraft's nav lights high in the sky heading westward. We could clearly hear the engine noise from that airplane. We heard no sound from the direction of the orange light. Then the orange light began fading and it, too, sprouted red strobe lights and began moving. This one got over Charlotte Harbor and snapped on a brilliant white search light aimed straight down at the water and left it on for a minute or so, then turned it off. It did the same thing the first two did and tracked almost straight over us and kept traveling in a southeasterly direction until we could no longer see it.

We were feeling pretty baffled by this and were still trying to think of SOMETHING that we could identify with what we were looking at. But it happened a third time a little while later. An orange light suddenly appeared over Port Boca Grande and hovered there, same spot in the sky. As we watched it hovering there we suddenly saw it jumping around in the sky in a kind of scribbling motion. Something we'd never guess a helicopter could do. And then after about 10 minutes in that spot it also dimmed and sprouted red strobes and began moving towards us. It passed over us without a sound and tracked off to the southeast until it was gone.

We had no idea WHAT kind of craft we were looking at. We had the impression it was nothing supernatural or "alien" but we also figured whatever it was we'd never see one parked on the ramp at RSW, either. I have noticed over the ensuing years that there have been UFO sightings reported over Charlotte Harbor and that they consisted of "orange lights".

I also, since then, have read about the Comanche helicopter. It was developed for the Army by Boeing and Sikorsky as a stealth helicopter. Nearly silent and with a very low radar profile. They supposedly did flight testing of one or two prototypes of this thing over southern Florida around the time period in question. That might explain what we saw. In fact, it seems the likeliest explanation in my mind. That funny "scribbling" motion on that last one kinda bothers me though. The G forces acting on an aircraft moving like that would surely destroy it. I just can't picture a helicopter doing that! Maybe they just wanted it to LOOK like it was doing that...?

I've seen other stranger things in the sky. Things that were most certainly NOT helicopters. I believe there are definitely things up there that defy conventional explanation! I'll post more as time permits. ;)
 
Fascinating account!

Perhaps the light was not the craft itself, but a light attached to the craft/helicopter? This might explain the 'scribbling' action - perhaps they were testing the targeting system on board a military helicopter?
 
I had that same idea, myself. I remember a bunch of years ago seeing some amazing maneuvers performed by some Harrier jump jets at an airshow. They made an odd statement about the maneuvers and then about tricking an enemy into being confused as to where the airplane really is.

I have a few minutes to relay another strange sighting. This occurred out at sea on a dark night in '73. I was on bridge watch on a Coast Guard weather cutter and we were drifting on an ocean station. Since we were drifting, the helmsman was "secured" (allowed to leave). We had the Officer of the Deck, a quartermaster, a messenger, a boatswain's mate of the watch and a lookout on the bridge watch. The messenger and lookout rotated positions each half hour and at the time of this sighting I was standing on the bridge as messenger. The lookout normally stood on the lookout deck immediately above the bridge. His job was to yell out anything he saw down the voice tube so the bridge crew could hear him and respond. It had been a pretty quiet night and we were just talking softly on the bridge when we suddenly heard the lookout screaming hysterically about a light flying around in the sky and "There it goes again, port side"! We all went running out to the port side bridge wing just in time to see a white light in the sky, seemingly far off in the distance and about 20 degrees above the horizon. It was STREAKING across the sky from the horizon behind our stern and disappeared over the horizon at our bow and it took it a matter of a few seconds to do that. It seemed we could actually see it following the curvature of the Earth as it went.

We were pretty excited by that and everyone was talking at the same time. I kept watching the sky in the direction the light had disappeared. Lo and behold, I saw it again. It shot almost straight up and seemed to disappear into space. We saw nothing more of it after that.

I've seen some strange things in the sky. I tend to think that most of the things we see and don't understand probably have a rather mundane explanation to them, if we only knew what that was. In this particular case I'm not inclined to lean that way.
 
Old_Shoe said:
..I tend to think that most of the things we see and don't understand probably have a rather mundane explanation to them, if we only knew what that was. In this particular case I'm not inclined to lean that way.
A sensible approach, and very much the Fortean one (there are those that will leap about at any light in the sky, eagerly film it and then squawk about proof of alien intelligences.)

You're right about Harriers - they can do stuff that defies logic! Anyway, thanks for a very good and rational account.
 
Well, to be honest, seeing that light in the sky and watching what it DID suggested to us that an alien intelligence was behind it. That is a hard conclusion to avoid having just seen that. And I suppose it is a logical conclusion based on the perceived performance of the thing. But it IS a conclusion based on a lot of missing information. Science has learned a few things since that time. Just today I saw a picture in the news of a sprite, which is a rare phenomenon but one which was finally identified as being associated with lightning. It's a freaky thing to see and "sprite" seems like a good name for it.

Also, since that sighting around 40 years ago, NASA has conducted some missions in space and we've all seen videos from some of those missions which show white lights flying around outside Earth's atmosphere. Mostly they look like streaking meteors but sometimes they change direction. Thinking back on our sighting, there's a very strong resemblance between what we saw that night and what we see on the NASA videos. I think that's rather interesting.

When I fly I love to look out the window and pay attention to what's happening. I like to know where we are at any given time, and to recognize landmarks on the ground. I also find it interesting to see other air traffic. I was on a commercial flight from Houston to Tampa one day. We'd taken off and had climbed out over Galveston Bay and headed out across the Gulf of Mexico. It was a clear day and there was a thin layer of little "puff bomb" clouds at around five thousand feet altitude. We climbed to our cruising altitude of thirty one thousand feet and leveled off and I was sitting in a window seat on the right side of the airplane behind the wing. Looking across the aisle and out the left side windows I could see we were just off of the Mississippi River delta. That was when I looked out my window down at the water of the gulf when some movement caught my eye. I thought it was an airplane far below us, but as I looked at it I realized it was NOT an airplane. It was a round disc shaped thing. It had a gray metallic look to it. It behaved like an airplane. It was traveling south and it appeared to be either slicing through the little puff bomb clouds, or just beneath them. Either way, the little clouds partially obscured my view of it as it passed them, so I estimated the altitude of this disc at around 5,000'. The speed seemed comparable to that of an airliner. But there were no wings or tail or engine nacelles, just the round disc. As we were traveling in a mostly easterly direction and it was traveling south, it quickly fell behind us and I craned my neck looking at it until I could see it no more.

I know people have been trying to build disc shaped flying machines since WWII, and have been at least marginally successful at it....case in point, the Canadian Avrocar flying saucer. So when I looked at this flying saucer over the gulf I didn't immediately associate it with little green men, and I still don't. But for me it did reinforce the idea that there ARE strange things flying around our skies. Some of them are probably manmade. Some of them might be natural phenomena. Some could be piloted by little green men. I can't say they aren't.
 
What interesting sightings, thanks for sharing them.

I tend to think that most of the things we see and don't understand probably have a rather mundane explanation to them, if we only knew what that was.
Well I mean in a sense anything that we actually understand by definition has a mundane explanation. If it were old news that these lights in the sky are android avatars of the Old Gods returning from Zeta Recticuli periodically to harvest human souls, that would be a mundane explanation.

As far as is known in the unclassified world, the Avrocar project bombed and never went into production, and there has never been a viable working aircraft having a disk shape, no wings, and no tail.

You sighting from the Coast Guard ship is also particularly interesting. IF your perception is accurate, there is no known natural phenomenon or unclassified aircraft (today, much less in 1973) that "streaks" across the sky and then shoots straight up into space.

The lights over the Gulf of Mexico are maybe closer to having a prosaic explanation but only if we conjecture about military aircraft capabilities. As a boy in 1966 I watched a silent bright orange light slowly trace a sharp-cornered triangle path in the night sky, repeatedly, for an hour. Silent helicopter is as close as I can come to a prosaic explanation. But I mean - - advanced secret military aircraft over cow country in upstate New York??
 
That's an interesting sighting you described from '66. And you have some interesting thoughts on the subject. I haven't delved too deeply into what I consider to be "possible" theories of things we see...I guess because we really don't have enough information to make intelligent guesses. What IS a light that streaks across the sky? I could naturally assume there's a physical object there which is emanating light. But if you stop and think about it, that's not necessarily true. A powerful search light located on the surface of the ocean could conceivably create that effect, although that's hardly likely. If someone or some thing was operating outside our known physical world they might be able to manipulate something that we see as a light in the sky, not much different than say, teasing a cat with a laser pointer. The cat gets excited and chases a point of light around the room. The cat has his own perspective what he's chasing around, but he'd never in a million years guess at laser technology.

Now I'm probably overthinking this a bit, but I do so to make a point. I think it's likely that the lights we saw probably were physical objects, but we really don't KNOW.
 
I agree there may or may not be a physical object; it's possible we're seeing somebody's laser pointer :) , some natural "light effect", or something generated entirely within the mind. But however you look at it, it's still an unknown phenomenon and you just can't help but try different theories and see if any of them stick even a little bit.

It's interesting that you have a hunch, as do I and many other people who've had sightings, that there was intelligence behind it. I think this is not just a hunch when you drill down into it, it's simply the theory that best fits what you perceived based on your knowledge and experience. In my case its because I can't conceive of a natural atmospheric phenomenon or animal repeatedly describing a geometrically precise triangle, and the flavor of the experience was completely dissimilar from any hallucination, dream, or optical illusion I've ever had. You get told that perception is unreliable, that ordinary things can look strange under extraordinary circumstances, etc, all of which is true (and I HAVE found good prosaic explanations for a few really strange sightings), but when you've examined all those possibilities and come up empty handed, dammit at some level one has to rely on and interpret one's sensory input! Your daily survival depends on it! Which is why I think that in at least a sizeable percentage of cases, people can be relied upon to judge when they've seen something unusual.
 
Rare atmospheric phenomenon over Armagh
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-23504254

The sprite appeared as a carrot-shaped flash of light

The Armagh Observatory has captured a rare atmospheric phenomenon known as a 'sprite' on film.

It is one of the very few observations of the phenomenon from the UK and Ireland.

The observatory said the detection was made around the time of a thunderstorm over Dublin on the 24/25 July 2013.

The images show the sprite, a carrot-shaped flash of light, rising high above the thunderclouds as seen from Armagh.

Typical lightning discharges often jump between clouds or between clouds and the ground.

Sprites are associated with similarly powerful electrical fields that occur high above the clouds of the Earth's atmosphere often during particularly intense thunderstorms.

The rare flashes are observed at heights from around 50 to 100 km, in the middle part of the Earth's atmosphere known as the mesosphere.

Because they are red and usually far away, to the naked eye sprites appear very faint and, like lightning, only last for a very short time - at most for up to a few hundredths of a second.

Unexpected
But they are very energetic phenomena and can measure up to several tens of kilometres across.

Their discovery in the late 1980s was unexpected, and only became possible when light-sensitive, surveillance-type video cameras were introduced.

The Armagh Observatory has used three of those cameras since 2005 to help study meteor activity in this region of the Earth's atmosphere.

On 25 July, around 15 lightning flashes were seen between 01:00 and 03:00 BST. At 01:05 BST the luminous, carrot-shaped sprite was recorded on video.

The Armagh Observatory's John McFarland said its ground location appeared to have been at least 30 km from Armagh roughly towards the direction of counties Louth and Dublin.

"It appears to be a typical 'red sprite', sometimes called a 'carrot' sprite owing to its distinctive shape," Mr McFarland said.

"Apart from being extraordinary and awesome to behold, the relatively recent discovery of sprites reminds us that the Earth's upper atmosphere remains a mystery, with a lot still to be learned about the environment of our own planet."

A moving image of the phenomenon can be seen at the observatory's website.
 
So, perhaps at least some UFO's are natural phenomena...? Could very well be that. We are trying to avoid attaching a name or a theory to what things in the sky MIGHT be for good reason, I think. In ancient myths and folklore, and in the Bible, there are mentions of things in the sky and in most cases the people who witnessed them (or the people who wrote it down) gave their own interpretations of what they saw. So in today's world we read it as they saw a chariot in the sky. An artist during the renaissance makes a painting and literally portrays a chariot in the sky and a modern school aged kid looks at it and wonders, "WTF were those people smoking"? Maybe at the time of the sighting 'chariot' seemed the best thing to call it, being the thing in the sky was thought to be a conveyance same as a chariot was a conveyance. Likewise, if we attach a perceived name to them our own terminology will eventually be viewed as equally laughable.
 
You raise a good point Old_Shoe (and I love how wonderfully that sentence flows! :D)

How many things may have been lost to time, I wonder, for the sake of not having the right words to describe something?
 
Good title to this thread, Reminds me of the Stevie Vai Song Little Green Men song which I've not heard for years. (Opens u itunes...)
 
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