SIGHTING: TERREBONNE, OREGON (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"I was on a camping trip in central oregon with my uncle, who is an army veteran, archaeologist, and an avid hiker/backpacker. we decided to spend the second half of the day climbing smith rock, northeast of redmond. by the time we reached the top it was starting to get dark so we decided to head back down. once it was dark enough, we could see just about everything you could expect to see at night out in the desert; stars, planets, meteors(shooting stars), planes, helicopters, satellites. but among all the various objects and lights populating the sky that night, one thing in particular grabbed my attention. it looked like a star, but very bright, brighter even then venus. stranger still, it appeared to be moving, but very slowly. in fact it was moving so slowly that i had to hold my finger up next to it, and after doing that and comparing its position with that of nearby stationary stars, i confirmed that it was indeed moving. i had seen a satellite earlier that same night, but it was much smaller and a little easier to tell that it was moving. at this point, i was very interested in figuring out what this object was. i pointed it out to my uncle, who after watching it for a about a minute was equally stumped as to what it could be. after about another minute of watching this object, it suddenly stopped and then rapidly ascended up into space and was gone. in what seemed like a blink of an eye it just shot up into space and disappeared. i remember being in a state of shock and thinking to myself, rather casually, "oh.....That's what it was...." me and my uncle both looked at each other, but didn't say a word, as if we both knew what we just saw and that nothing needed to be said. since it was late and getting cold, and we were still only halfway down the face of the rock, we didn't have time to stand in amazement or wait to see if it returned or if something else would happen. as we finished heading down, all i could think about was that object we just witnessed, and struggling to come up with a more earthly explanation for it, trying not to jump to the far more tempting and exciting conclusion as to what it could be. after we reached the bottom, i couldn't contain myself any longer and finally asked my uncle what he thought the object was. he told me that i think we both know what that was, which confirmed to me that we were both on the same page. he then admitted to me that he had seen something like that before. while he was in iraq, watching the bombing of baghdad during the initial invasion, his buddy pointed out some lights to him in the sky. there, at a far higher elevation then any of their planes, were several lights moving rapidly in the sky and performing all sorts of impossible feats. the lights continued to do this for an hour or more, and as a historic moment of history was taking place behind them, he and the rest of his group were just sitting on the top of their vehicle looking in the opposite direction, watching something far more interesting. i spent the rest of that night thinking about what we had seen, and about my uncle's story, and that the implications of it just made an already amazing universe that much more fascinating. "