SIGHTING: PRIEST RIVER, ID
Witness Testimony
"Classic saucer with colored lights circling the rim; stationary for a long time so we got a GOOD look!My ex husband and I were up late one night. He was working on his bicycle and had to go out to the barn for a tool. He came back a couple minutes later and said I should come out and 'check out these lights'. I went out and was astonished by the brilliance of these blinking lights visible in the northern sky in a gap between a bunch of fir trees. (My house was about 7 miles north of town.) I went to get a pair of binoculars and my jaw truly dropped to the ground: I saw a disc-shaped object, like the lid of a sauce pan, metallic or silvery-grey in color. The lights (red and blueish-green) were not blinking after all, but were circling the edge of the disc. They seemed to blink when looking with the naked eye only because the lights disappeared behind the object - which was itself not bright enough to be visible to the naked eye - and reappeared as they circled again to the front. My ex and I took turns watching through the binoculars. He made the comment that it looked like "a wheel within a wheel". The object bobbed like a cork in a standing wave of water but stayed in roughly same spot the entire time we watched it (well over an hour)! Through the binoculars, it appeared to be about the size of a pencil eraser at arm's length; with the naked eye it was somewhat larger than the size of a bright star or planet. I guessed it was about 2 or 3 miles away. It looked like it was hovering over an area called Prater Mountain - or, possibly, Blue Lake at the foot of Prater. (Two weeks later we heard that a neighbor saw a ufo around the same time, also near Prater.) After a while, my ex went to bed but I watched it until it disappeared. It didn't zip away, like so many ufos are reported to do; it seemed to gradually get smaller until it resembled a star. (However, I was scanning the sky from time to time, so it might have vamoosed when I was looking elsewhere.) I saw it again (or something similar) the next night: I was keeping my eye on a "bright star" off in the North when suddenly it zoomed straight towards me.! I was ready to run back to the house and hide under the bed! It stopped farther away, however - I would guess a distance of 8 miles or so (through the binoculars it looked like blinking red and blue lights rotating in a tight circle, and the object itself was not discernable). My sister and brother-in-law had arrived on a visit from California earlier that day. I woke them up and when my sister saw it she remarked that "it's definitely something, all right - I wonder if the government is experimenting with new aircraft." This should have been the ultimate confirmation for me, as my sister is a die-hard skeptic! (though I don't think the government can make something that behaves as that thing did...) As the days went by, I began to convince myself that what we saw could have been some sort of atmospheric disturbance. But then, we heard of someone else in the neighborhood who saw it, and a few weeks later, mufon or some other organization posted flyers asking people to let them know if they had seen something during that period. And finally, around Feb or Mar of the following year, there was a video on some tv show supposedly showing a ufo down along the Spokane River between Coeur d'Alene and Post Falls. I didn't see it but heard the video was taken during the spring of '94, just a few weeks before our sighting. My conclusion: either the guv, mufon, and other nameless entities/individuals were conspiring together to inflame my latent paranoia(!), or... we really SAW something extraordinary! (I have not reported this sighting to any organization or agency until now.)"
