SIGHTING: VASHON ISLAND, WA, USA

Witness Testimony

"At approximately 9:45 PM a friend and I were outside conversing when I spotted what seemed to be a line of lights moving toward us from the northwest. In my excitement I fumbled for my smart phone but because of fat thumbs failed to get a video. The lights seemed to come from much further away and pass overhead quite close to us. There were clouds in the sky and I could hear a jet going by from SeaTac. The lights would go in and out behind the clouds, which were not very high. The reason the lights seem to come from far away and then come closer was because they seemed initially to be close together, brighter, and smaller; and then when it passed, almost directly overhead, it was like watching the lights of an ocean liner going by. The lights were all aligned in a single axis. They did not blink, and they did not waver from their relative positions to each other. They were not so bright that it was difficult to look at them. Overhead they did not seem so bright as they had when I first sighted them. I kept trying to see if there was a bulk behind them, as of a single massive body, but could not detect any thing like that. The sound of the jet obscured any sound they might have been making, but my impression was that the whole apparition was totally silent. While I was initially fumbling for my phone, my friend excitedly asked me if I had seen what the lights “just did” - I said no. He said that they seemed to have folded up and disappeared behind a cloud. It seemed that the apparition was over. However they reappeared more spread out, and preceded in a graceful (not to mention stately) manner toward us. Once or twice they would pass behind a cloud and then be seen again. By the time they were overhead, my friend kept saying he thought they must be no more than one or two thousand feet above us. I replied that I couldn’t tell how high they were, and at that angle of viewing and with the light as dim as it was, there was no way to gauge distance. So, they could have been very near or they could have been much further away. I had no way of gauging their actual size or distance from each other. They proceeded over us, and at a very high angle disappeared again behind a cloud but did not re-emerge. I will say that despite being unable to gauge distance or height, the fact that they were close to each other initially and then further and further apart made it seem as though they drew quite close to us. I can think of only one explanation as to why they would be brighter if they were further away in that scenario. If the lights were on one trajectory, and then rotated down to pass close overhead, they would seem to fold up as my friend witnessed. This would naturally be followed as they approached by the lights becoming further from each other, still in a line, and this was what we thought we observed. But then one would think that if they were closer they would be brighter. This was definitely not the case. They seemed initially to be brighter. The sun had set some time before, but if they were high enough they could possibly have been reflecting the sun, and then been unable to reflect as brightly as they passed into the earth’s shadow. That would make them very high indeed."