SIGHTING: PULASKI, VIRGINIA (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"At about 5:55pm on saturday, 12/8/18, i had just gotten in my car to go to town. my driveway runs almost exactly east-west and is slightly inclined to the west. my car was pointing due west with several houses and trees between me and the western horizon. it was dark outside and no stars were visible. since there was a winter storm approaching that was supposed to start around midnight, i assumed there was thick cloud cover. as i started my car and turned the headlights on, i saw what appeared to be a signal flare appear from behind a house across the alley from my yard. this light reminded me of flares i'd seen in movies where a flare was shot at night over an ocean; it was a bright pinkish-purple color. i had never seen an aircraft with this color of light. it wasn't moving very fast, and there were no changes in its speed or direction, although it was traveling behind a tree that was in between the house and the alley. all of this made me assume it was a flare. as i watched the light move from my right to left, i saw another light of the same color and intensity appear from behind the same house, appearing to follow right behind the first light. at this point i decided to shut the headlights off and turn off my car. i was still wondering why someone was firing off signal flares. this whole sequence took about 15-20 secs. at this point i got out of the car and started walking up my driveway to the neighbor's yard. there was no sound that i could hear coming from the lights. after just one or two steps up my driveway, i realized there was an identical third light that was visible. it was hard for me to tell because of the tree that was in the way, but at the time, i thought they were all in a line and about the same distance apart. i got my phone out and started trying to get my camera in video mode. by the time i got to my neighbor's yard (about 50 ft), i realized that the lights formed what appeared to be an equilateral triangle. they were completely stationary for a few seconds and i felt as if i was looking at the bottom of a craft, although all i could see were the 3 lights. the lights were bright, but were not pulsing at all and they never changed color or intensity. when i finally got my phone to record, they had begun to move, but again, there was no quick acceleration or darting; the motion was very methodical. there was a guy a few houses down from where i was, and i began yelling for him to come to me because i wanted someone else to see them. by the time he got to where i was, one of the lights had disappeared to the west (possibly in cloud cover), so he only saw the last two lights. it's clear on the recording that there was no sound of aircraft. i ended the video before the last 2 lights completely disappeared from our view because they were no longer visible on my phone. on the video, the color of the lights doesn't appear as it looked to us in person. at, the very end of the recording, you can hear the guy i called over say "they're an odd color". also, my memory of it was that the bottom two lights switched sides and then the right one flew west leaving the other two to slowly fade away and finally disappear. watching the video, that's not what happened at all; it appears the lights were all part of one object that did some kind of turn/roll and then flew east as a whole and disappeared into the cloud cover. the bright object in the foreground is a street light about 150-200ft from where i was. i called the local airport and police the next day trying to see if someone had seen anything but i was basically dismissed. i also asked the airport about the visibility/cloud cover but again they were dismissive and told me to find it online; so unfortunately i don't have a maximum distance that the lights could've been from me, but there had to be massive cloud cover in that area because we started getting snow about 1:30am and wound up with about 16" by the end of the next day. since the observation, i believe this youtube video: https://youtu.Be/ikjhsxwu-am (of the supposed tr3b astra) shows lights that were the same as the ones i saw; although in this video there are additional lights visible that were not visible in my sighting, the 3 'corner' lights are almost identical to what i saw. i have attached the original video, a video of the same area shot during the day, several marked up photos and photos generated by a surveying app that gives elevation, gps, wtc."