SIGHTING: MARICOPA, ARIZONA (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"It was around 9:15 pm and me and a friend had set up a telescope to see the night sky away from the city lights. We parked in the driveway of an abandoned worn-down trailer and set up. After a few hours of viewing, we were talking about taking down the telescope and as my friend began to take apart the scope, I looked up in the sky towards the southwest in the general direction of Gila Bend. I saw a very orange light and then it went off and one came on in front of its location, as if heading in our direction. Then, that light went out and another came on in front of it, closer to us. In all, 6 lights did this coming toward our direction and what to me appeared to be directly over the train track across the street. My first thought was that it went on light a lightning bug light does. It seemed like a natural light to me in that way when it went on and off. It was completely silent outside--nothing around--very quiet. By about the third light, I knew this wasn't normal and called my friend. He looked up and saw the light a few times before it went away for a while. I rushed for my flipcam and my friend rushed to put away the telescope, not comfortable with the weird lights. A few minutes later, we looked up again and saw them, in a slightly different location, slightly more southerly. It seemed like two lights that would go on and off separately and sometimes on together and seeming to move slightly, slowly in the same direction together. They were redder than a HPS light, but still in the orange part of the spectrum. They were about 5 degrees off the horizon, about a degree apart, and about -2 magnitude (my astronomy/chemistry friend reports these definitions). These events would last only seconds, the lights being on anywhere from 2 seconds to 5 seconds and about a few minutes between showings again. The lights were interpreted by my friend as having a slight twinkling, but not as much as stars at that altitude. To me, they had that lightning bug quality of how they went on and off and how long they lit. My friend reports the lights going on and off as ramping on for a half second on and then a half second off. My friend got his binoculars and caught one light in the sights and it looked rather incandescent and not like a line source. He could see stars around the light, it was not blocking out part of the sky. There were no planes associated with the lights, though we had seen a few planes in that area, but not at that time. All together we witnessed these light events about 5 times. We finally had more than a few minutes apart from the last witnessing and the scope was packed and we were ready to leave, so we left. I did pull out the flipcam and got some choppy video of one of the lights. I am curious by nature and I was excited to see it, felt it was a strange wonder of nature. I had no sense of it being attached to a vehicle because of the random spacing of the lights. My friend thought it was very unusual and had never seen anything like it. He knew it was not any kind of star or planet. And, not any typical behavior of an aircraft. He thought it was approaching us at first and spooked him a little bit. "