SIGHTING: HELENA, AL

Witness Testimony

" Single light appearing before dusk appears to be multiple objects before disappearingThis evening my wife and I were with our 20 month old daughter in our backyard so my daughter could play in her baby pool. I looked up to see any aircraft visable as we are about 100 miles west of ATL and we usually have good air traffic overhead.I noticed a light that would be similar to the brightness of Venus directly overhead, but at about 85 degrees, slightly to the west. I asked my wife if she could see it and she said that she did. No other lights were visable in the sky and 30 minutes later in the same spot where we witnessed this, there are still no other lights in the sky, including and stars or planets.The light was stationary as far as we could tell. At one point I picked up my daughter and leaned her back and asked her if she could see it. She pointed to the light. After 10 minutes, the sun had set over the horizon or behind clouds to the northwest. The light was no longer there but my wife said that she could still see it. I could not but as I tried, two aircraft in the area allowed my eyes to focus back on the object. At that moment my wife said that there were now 3 objects. I noticed that the main object appeared doughnut shaped and the other two appeared as smaller dots. To me it looked like one of the dots shot out of the larger doughnut. After only about a minute of looking at this strange cluster of objects, they disappeared. These objects were far higher than the altitude of the commercial airplane traffic that was in the area. The weather conditions at the time were 85 degrees F, humidity 59 percent, wind south at 1 MPH with a visibility of ten miles. The sky was and still is partly cloudy with showers off to our northwest about 20 miles away.One last detail... For some reason last night, I was out after dusk and had an uncommon urge to look up at the sky as if I was looking for something out of the ordinary. I don't look for strange things but last night I just felt the need to and then tonight we saw something strange. Interesting. "