flashing green, red, blue, and white lights hovering above and scanning valleys north of Missoula.At approximately two AM on Sunday, July 10th, my girlfriend, another friend of mine, and me stepped out into the back yard to smoke a cigarette. We were about halfway done smoking when I noticed what appeared to be police light on top of the hill north of our house. When I pointed them out, my friend said there was no way for a cop car to get there and no reason at this hour.We all began to study the flashing lights more and saw that there was a green light as well as the red, white, and blue flashing lights that caught my attention. We, soon after, saw that the object wasn’t on the hill but hovering slightly above it. We stayed to watch it and it began to move northwest.The UFO seemed to be scanning the valleys north of Missoula. A bright light periodically would sweep through the valley and as it moved farther away we could see the light beaming down from it. Where we had originally spotted it, there seemed to be a disturbance in the air. It was like a billowing cloud of smoke but it was translucent and had a shimmering effect to it. When the UFO got far enough away, we could see at least one other object farther out to the north-east that appeared to be ascending and scanning the ground as well.At the base of the "cloud" we noticed three small, gentle lights: one red, one blue and one green creeping over the hill. These lights seemed to hover above the hill and were obviously very active, moving about the hill quickly and erratically scanning in miniature like the UFO had been. They stopped, sometimes, reconvening and resting. We did not see the figures except faintly in the light of the UFO scans. They were brown looking in the dark and very, very tall. The first glimpse my girlfriend caught of one it seemed to be doing flips, like a slinky would. The figures were lanky, bony looking and gangling. It was when we noticed the figures descending the hill toward us that we went inside and tried to settle down.((NUFORC Note: Star?? PD))