SIGHTING: BIG LAKE, MINNESOTA (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"I (male age 57) drove from St. Paul to St. Cloud to pick up our son (age 20) from college to come home for Thanksgiving. We were heading southbound on Interstate 94, it was quite dark out, and when we got to about the city of Big Lake, we saw lots of emergency vehicles flashing on the northbound side of the freeway and as we passed by them heading southbound, we began talking about the HUGE traffic jam that had piled up, that was caused by the emergency vehicles, and stretched out for several miles southward involving hundreds if not thousands of cars. We were speculating on what the emergency could be and saying how glad we were that we weren't caught in it. Miles later, as we approached the southern end of the traffic jam, we saw out the left side of our windshield, about 30 degrees above the horizon, a small bright white light with a huge and very bright white light right next to it which we estimated was about 500 feet in the air. I said to my son "oh look, there's a helicopter coming up from the Twin Cities to check out the traffic jam emergency. It's probably from one of the news stations or maybe it's one of the State Patrol's Bell Jetranger helicopters." I said this because it looked to me like a helicopter that was shining a very bright spotlight that was coming right towards us. What struck me as odd the closer we got was that there were no red and green navigation lights shining. I would expect to see a green light on the right front side of the helicopter and a red light on the left front side of the helicopter, and a white light at the rear, as all aircraft are required to display for safe visual navigation, but there were none, just the very small white light, and the HUGE white light next to it. Now I'm doing freeway speed, in traffic, while trying my best to glance up at this thing as often as possible. I said to my son "I wish we could pull over and take a good hard look at this thing." (And I would have, had I been on any type of road other than an interstate freeway.) As I finished saying that, the huge bright white light turned into a very small white light identical to the other small white light, so now there were only the two very small white lights side by side to each other, just hanging there in the air. As we approached it, it now was no longer seen outside our windshield, but now out my driver's window as we passed underneath. It was definitely hovering. We were directly below and slightly to it's right from my perspective. As I looked up, the two small white lights suddenly turned off and 3 small bright green lights turned on, so now I'm looking up from directly below at 3 bright green lights in a perfectly triangular pattern. My son could not see that because he was over in the passenger seat, unable to see out high enough through my driver's door window. I said "the 2 white lights just turned into 3 green lights! It's a triangle!" As I finished saying that, the southernmost green light had a flashing white strobe light appear right next to it! To give an idea of what this looked like, imagine looking up into the dark sky and seeing 3 green lights in a perfect triangle 10 feet away from each other, then imagine a white strobe appearing 1 foot from one of the green lights. This white strobe looked identical to the white strobes employed by aircraft at night. I can't explain the small/huge white light/lights. They were most definitely completely out of place and out of the norm for any known aircraft that I've ever seen! (The huge white light had looked to me like an aircraft landing light... that bright.) There were positively no red/green/white navigation lights, common to all aircraft, in their FAA required locations, that I could see. The best I can simply describe this as is that it was an object with the ability to turn on or off 3 green lights in a triangle pattern, and which had the ability to turn on and off 2 small white lights and/or a large white light in front, and also the ability to turn on or off a blinking white strobe light in the rear. As a lifelong aviation enthusiast and licensed private pilot, I know airplanes inside and out, airplanes large and small, jets, helicopters, and blimps and I know what they all look like in day or night. This was like something I have never seen before. This looked like a helicopter approaching, but as we neared it, I realized it wasn't approaching but hovering. As we passed underneath, it turned off the small and big white spot lights, and turned into a green 3-lighted triangle. As we passed further underneath, the green triangle turned on a single white strobe light next to only 1 of the green lights. This was no aircraft I've ever experienced day or night. It remains to me unidentified, hence my report here now. This was an unidentified flying object hovering low above a busy city during a huge highway emergency. There must have been hundreds of witnesses to it, I'll bet many witnesses were law enforcement officers handling the freeway emergency. They couldn't have missed it! It was right over all of our heads, hovering, with an extremely bright light shining on it. The bright light did not shine down to the ground. It shone straight out ahead of the object the entire time it was turned on. "