SIGHTING: LOCKHART, TEXAS (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"In the evening of November 16, 2013, around a quarter to seven, it was dark in Lockhart, Texas. I was walking the cat behind our apartment complex which runs North and South. My attention was drawn to a bright orange light moving behind the trees. For an instant, I thought it was a bolide, but then discarded that idea because it was moving so slowly and left no trail. It was about 500 feet above the ground, and the sky was hazy with a visibility of maybe 5 miles. The hazy full moon was visible but stars were not. There is a small airport a mile to the South, so I thought the light might be coming from a small aircraft moving at 100 mph, but there was NO noise. It took about 15 seconds for the light to go from being due West of me to disappearing behind the trees to the North.I then saw a second light, the same color, brightness, altitude, speed, and track. I walked back to my apartment, and a third light appeared, following the first two. I then saw a commercial jet aircraft flying West from the Austin-Bergstrom airport 15 miles to the Northeast. Its sound was following behind it by 4 seconds, so it was 4000 feet away. My lights were much closer, still completely silent. I tried to take a cellphone video of the 3rd light but it didn't register. I got my wife out to look as the fourth light went by. It did not register on the cell phone either but she verified my sighting.The lights were the color of the sodium-vapor street light across the street. They presented as a sphere about 1/20th the size of the full moon's disk. Their illumination was uniform from center to edge. There seemed to be no obstruction such as a landing light lamp holder which would change the shape or intensity of the light as the viewing angle changed. There was an almost imperceptable pulsing of the light; maybe 1% of the total brightness, at about 1 second intervals, but it was not a separate light such as a xenon-discharge marker. I could see the individual lights on the commercial jet, in focus thru the haze, but these orange lights were not coming from a point source. They looked like an out-of-focus source, something like looking at Venus thru a telescope that is not in focus, but one or two magnitudes brighter than Venus.Observer: Chris Franks Hobbies include astronomy and identifying lights in the sky. This is my first failure-to-identify in 80 years. Worked as an electrical engineer for the Aircraft Radio Division of Cessna Aircraft, then 41-1/2 years as an engineer for Hewlett Packard. Worked with Charles Adams, who analyzed the "crystal skull" artifact and debunked its supposed extra-terrestial origin."