SIGHTING: BLACKBURN, ENGLAND (UNITED KINGDOM)

Witness Testimony

"at approximately 22:30 pm saturday 13th sept 2008 a friend and myself walked out into my yard planning to try and snap some night shots with his new olympus E410 slr camera, being a new hobby of his it was to be a trial and error type of operation and we really weren't expecting any type of miracle results, we certainly didn't expect to to end up snapping what we did.At my friends request i had gone to find a camera tripod i knew i had somewhere and on returning found my fearless pal retreating back into the kitchen backwards with a very worried look on his face. on asking what the **** was up with him he just pointed and asked "so what would that be then?"I have to admit his worried look was justified for a second while "comet" went through my head and "plane crash" because the whole cloud looked as if it were on fire, my friend later described it as "a fire in the sky". It is a shame we spent the next twenty seconds doing laurel and hardy impressions, running around tripping over ourselves, we couldn't believe what we were seeing. by the time we had camera and tripod set up the object in question had cleared the clouds and was giving off a beautifully sharp burnt orange/red (like fire i suppose but much ...clearer?) this is where my friend managed to get a few shots off as it started to make it's way away from us to the east over the rooftops, this is when i moved to get a better look and noticed the second object, much brighter, lower and much nearer coming straight towards us. we hadn't noticed this one due to the chimney blocking our line of site. after a brief arguement about shaking people when they're trying to take a photo we managed to reposition the camera and get both objects in the view finder.by this time the first object was disappearing over to the east and within a matter of 10-15 seconds the second one had stopped approximately 1 mile away, hovered in place for a matter of seconds and joined it leaving us both pretty much dumbfounded.the whole event must have taken no more than 4-5 mins. maybe even less. it certainly wasn't a helicopter or aeroplane, i can't say what it was but it was eerily strange and a little un-nerving, especially the cloud effect.the objects moved slowly, independently of each other and were seen in the east in the approach to manchester airport which is approximately 20 miles away. all i know about the pics themselves is the fact that he was trying different (apeture/f-stop..?) settings to get more detail, some shots worked many didn't but we managed to get a few.I'm not sure what i expect any-one to do with this, i'm sure it's just one more of an increasing number of reports but the photo's are yours to do whatever it is you do with them and i hope they help.thank-youjohnp.s.photo P9131979.bmp not agreat photo but it shows both in the same shot. "