i was hanging with two close and dear friends on my rooftop at 429 am thursday morning. i live in the hip williamsburg area of brooklyn. my friends and i had decided to hang out on my rooftop as to not disturb my roommates who were asleep at the time. i have always been a stargazer and avid fan of the ufo phenomena. i'd never seen anything in the sky that surprised or alarmed me in the past. my two companions have been dating for a long time and we had all lived together and worked together at various points in our lives. i had been listening to my female companion talk about an idea she had for an upcoming photography and art collaboration, i was quite sober at the time, i had driven them to my place from a bar down the street where we had decided to meet to discuss some of our ideas for the project. we had been discussing the idea of working together for some time and being night owls, a '3 am to 3:45 am last call' impromptu meeting was not out of the question. we are all self employed night owls and it is completely normal for any of us to be up at that time. so it's now about 429 am thursday morning and i was listening to my female companion talk about some of her interests and current pursuits in photography. we were awaiting another couple to arrive who would be the models for our proposed shoot. suddenly i felt the urge to turn around and look up at the sky. i saw four seemingly massive lights hovering quite a distance away from where we were sitting. i live directly across from an enormous corporate verizon building headquarters. i was facing that direction, and the city of manhattan from that perspective would be directly behind me. i was watching the four lights, which appeared at that moment to be above the bushwick, bedstuy area of brooklyn. i quickly exclaimed my surprise at the four odd luminous bright white lights that were being obscured by a thin cloud covering. i am not a good estimator of distance and size ratio while looking at the sky. it could have been a football field in diameter for all i know. being a ufo enthusiast i immediately hoped for the best, and was practically beaming with delight. perhaps the lights were anywhere from a mile to two miles away. we all began to exclaim how exciting this was, and being photographers and iphone enthusiasts we quickly utilized the video app on our devices. i was so calm and quick to take the film, i felt a bit of adrenaline surge as i hit the red record button, to my delight i began capturing the event on video. what luck, as the four lights began to fade rapidly. then, suddenly, the same four lights reappeared like magic a bit below and to the left of the original formation. it was an extremely dark night, stars were not visible, and neither were any planes or helicopters. we could not find or think of an explanation for this event. although bewildered and perplexed, we were quite happy to see it, we did not feel danger, we felt that we had seen a classic unidentified flying object. was it aliens from space? maybe, though whatever it was it sure did put a smile on my face and on the faces of my two companions. i'd wanted to see and capture something like this since i was a small kid. i got my wish. i am very happy to have seen this ariel phenomena, but as all good thing things come to an end, just as soon as i'd noticed that object in the sky, we watched in amazement as it fizzled and faded out into the clouds as if it had never been there. happy fourth of july d.R. july 2nd 2017