At around 8.15 - 8.20pm my son looked out of the bedroom window at the darkening clouds toward the west, and a bright red light was seen stationary at nearly 45 degrees elevation, almost due west of us. We live in Christchurch Central. I have moderate colour-blindness, but this object was a strong red colour, even to me. As we looked, it began to move in a sou-westerly direction, and went behind the neighbouring building for some two minutes or more. In moving, and given its apparent distance, it was moving faster than a plane, but it flashed on and off as it went. I moved from that room and went out onto the porch and sat on a seat, when it suddenly returned from that direction at a similar speed and my kids and wife all called out "There it is again". The object stopped right back where it was before, again bright red and completely stationery for perhaps 20 - 30 seconds, before it flashed greenish and then began moving - I would say accelerating - in the direction of about 10 degrees north of west, something like the direction to Westport or Greymouth. It was letting out big flashes as it went, and went from greenish to a washed out yellow in its flashes, and my son claimed to see a greyish object at the centre of the flashes. I did not see these personally. It took about five seccnds, running on what seemed to be a fixed altitude, to get far enough west to drop below a tree-line on that horizon, starting from its 45 degree elevation, and was completely unlike an aircraft that takes a few minutes to disappear from view. It had no wing or tail lights. The whole object was either illuminate or dark. It only flashed on and off about five o six times before it dropped over the horizon, so seems to have been moving pretty fast. because these flashes seemed to be equally spaced in distance as much as time, I would say it was accelerating away. I then ran to my internet, and found that a year earlier, only 25 minutes later at night, a bright red object had landed on a Greymouth road and taken off again. It did indeed seem to be heading in that very direction.

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• Wife ran for camera but it left