SIGHTING: OCALA, FLORIDA (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"Beginning at approximately 9:50pm march 16, 2020, and ending at approximately 1:10am march 17, 2020 at hopkins prairie recreational area in ocala national forest, florida (marion county) usa, my friend brandon and i observed several uap. from our camp at campsite 14, facing across the adjacent swamp roughly south towards pinecastle naval bombing range, we simultaneously witnessed a red or red-orange light rise suddenly from below the tree line, stop and hover a few degrees above the tree line for less than one minute, before it moved up and to the right, followed by up and to the left before the light faded out abruptly. shortly thereafter, while facing west across the water, we observed a bright round light hovering low in the sky (video attached). this light source was brighter than any star in the sky at the time (it was a very clear sky overhead, with a large number of visible stars), and i remember it being sort of orange-yellow when we first noticed it. i assumed it to be a planet, as it was larger, lower and brighter than anything in the sky, but it did appear to be moving subtly. we tried to track it's altitude and it's orientation with relation to the tree line below, and it did appear to ascend and descend, and move to the right, though it remained in roughly the same section of sky for the 20 minutes or more we watched it. the light appeared white during this activity, though i did not notice an abrupt color change from the original warmer hue. a few times, the light appeared to fade out in such a way that i assumed this 'planet' was being obscured by clouds. however, on the final fade out, the object never reappeared. something that bright surely would have been visible again if it was indeed a planet. but it did appear to be close by, and as previously stated, mobile, leading me to rule out 'planet'. before the final fade out, we witnessed a bright horizontal flash of light from right to left (as we faced west). at this point we decided to pack up camp and leave, as we were feeling very unsettled. four more times before leaving camp, however, we observed the red-orange light from the south again, twice accompanied by a second, identical light. one light appeared to maneuver strangely at higher altitude (roughly midway between the ground and the commercial aircraft passing above the uap), while the others stayed closer to the tree line. after packing up, we drove into the forest in the direction of the lights, but did not see them again. a few things that may or may not be related. 1. the first uap observed was the reddish light rising from the tree to in the south. this was the only time we saw the uap appear on all the other occasions that night, we noticed the uap already in the sky. when we stared at the area during a period of non-activity, we did not see activity resume in that part of the sky. only after we stopped paying attention and resumed packing up camp, or running to the other side of the campsite to check on the western uap, did we notice the red dots in the sky were active and visible again. 2. we may have noticed a pattern (not entirely certain). when the red dots to the south would disappear, we seemed to notice a commercial aircraft was always passing overhead in the same moment. but we never noticed the plane until the red dot(s) had disappeared. 3. the camp site was very busy that night, the busiest i've ever seen it. this is notable only because everyone else on the campground seemed to go to sleep moments before activity began, and despite us being very noisy as we observed these uap (honestly, we were kind of freaking out), i was surprised nobody woke up or asked us to quiet down even the three large dogs on the adjacent camp site were absolutely silent when my friend accidentally run onto their camp site during a panicked moment. we found this all somewhat strange. 4. in the midst of all of this activity, we admitted to one another that we felt equally worried about driving home as we did about staying. we felt that if we left, we were going to be stopped by whatever we were seeing. as previously stated, however, we noticed no other activity after leaving camp around 1:10am."