SIGHTING: WARM SPRINGS, OREGON (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"This seems to be a monthly occurrence and it just happened tonight. In the late evening my wife and I will see one or two unusual amber/red lights between Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Hood in the Oregon Cascades. The lights seem constant but flicker in intensity(on bright to on dim instead of on to off.) If you were to draw a line between the two mountain peaks the lights would be in the middle, but about 5 miles to the East. The lights typically hover above the forest for a couple minutes, slowly drift up for about 5 seconds and then fade away in about half a second. From my house I can see these lights and using Google Earth estimate them to be about 40 miles away in Wasco County. The lights seem to be about 500-1000ft above the forest floor. When they rise they probably reach an altitude of about 2000-3000ft before disappearing. Once I saw two of the lights at the same time and they were separated by maybe a mile. Sometimes there will be one light that appears and then disappears a few minutes later, to be followed by another light that does the same.I'll be the first to tell you that this is not some spectacular aerial display, but it is odd. My friend claims to have been witness to this phenomena for nearly 20 years, in the same spot. Sometimes he sees it in the early morning and sometimes in the late evening. The reasons I doubt this to be conventional aircraft are: The color of the light is unusual, the light(s) sometimes bounce around in a way that would make a helicopter pilot sick, the lights remain stationary for long periods of time, the lights appear and then disappear in a way that conventional aircraft to not, the lights are seen over a seemingly uninteresting portion of a forest.My wife has an aviation background and I'm an engineer. We aren't dummies, we just see weird things sometimes."