Huge shapeless cluster of red and blue green lights with sporadic white stobe-like flashes floating over Barra, Rio de Janeiro.Let me begin this by saying that I am filing this because I ALMOST DIDN'T, and wondered how often THAT happens. It occurred 1 week ago, and at the time, my companion and I were so freaked out that we just drove around and talked about it, making phone calls to anyone we could think of to see if anyone else had seen it. As I was on vacation in Brazil, it was very difficult as an American citizen to figure out who the hell to call in the first place. My friend, a Brazilian, had no idea either. We searched the web the next day but found nothing. I vowed to return to the States and make sure that anyone else looking to see if someone else saw this particular 'whatever' could at least have a chance of finding me/this account. I would like to further predicate this report by making the all too common declarations of "I'm not crazy, and this isn't b-s". I am a licensed attorney in Florida. My friend is a genius and was admitted to both MIT and Harvard. In short, we are sober, sane, intelligent people not given to mistaking blimps, planes, helicopters, weather balloons, the aurora borealis or gases from deep within the bowels of the earth for what we saw for about 6 or 7 minutes last Wednesday, the 9th of July, 2003 at approximately 11:30 p.m. I hope that someone contacts me to get a better account, clue me in to other reports of this incident, or to give me a lie detector to find out that we saw something, and I seriously doubt that it was 'one of ours'. Unfortunately, it is not as spectacular as being a description with photos or a definate shape. We actually started racing back to the hotel to get the digital camera when we lost it, ore rather it lost us. All I know is what follows: My frind and I had just dropped off his brother at a restaurant in the City of Barra (do Tejuco) about 10 minutes south of Copa Cobana in Rio de Janeiro. We were driving north towards Copa and were about 4 miles south of the tunnel that takes you under a mountain separateing Barra and the Ipanema, Le Blon, and Copa area. It was somewhat overcast, I beleive, at least it was hazy, you could see a pinkish orange haze in the sky reflecting the electric lights of the area below. I was in the passenger seet, and was looking at my friend in mid sentence when I saw whatever it was in the sky behind his head. I'm pretty sure my exact words were "what is that thing, dude?" to which he responded "the mount---" as he turned to look, assuming I was looking at one of the numerous mountains in the area. He never finished the word mountian, instead switching immediately to a decidedly excited "what the f is THAT???". We immediatley pulled over to the side of the road, in front of a guard gate with a private security guard who started toward us to investigate us as we were hopping out of the car. We immediatley started pointing at the 'thing' and he joined us in trying to figure out what we were looking at. More accurately, I was making sure of what I wasn't looking at, that I was indeed seeing something worth reporting here. Hanging in the sky to our west, in plane sight, was a huge cluster of lights. I apologize for the banality of the description, but as much as we strained to focus on it, we couldn't see any dark shape upon which these lights would be affixed. It therefore made it very difficult to determine how far away it was, or how big it was. My best guess was that it was about 1/4 to 1/2 mile away, probably about 500 feet in the air. It seemed to be totally silent, but the traffic noise or the direction of the wind could have masked sound. I can't even say that it was 1 of 100 things, although it seemed to be one object or cluster moving together. It was covered in red and greenish blue lights that pulsed and flickered. Some would get really bright. while others would disappear completely only to seem to grow bright out of complete darkness in almost but not exactly the same place as before. This was a lot of the reason why we couldn't figure out what we were looking at or if there was more that one. I'd say that there was 40 to 50 of these red lights and blue-green lights in a kind of sideways L shape. The at times seemed totally disjointed, and at other times they seemed to pair up. All around this cluster were another 30 or 40 pure white flashing strobe-like lights. They weren't flashing in any kind of pattern, it looked more like machine gun muzzle flashes in the dark, only pure white and 500 feet in the air. It was moving slowly north and we watched it dumbfounded for about 5 minutes, when we stupidly figured we could make it the 3 miles back to my friends condo and grab his digital camera. I wish I had sat where I was and watched it more carefully, but it didn't seem to be in any hurry to leave, or very concerned about being seen. You could see other people along the sidewalk looking at it and pointing to. We hopped in the car and started racing back to get the camera, all the while watching this cluster in the sky. My friend, driving, was watching too, which had me a little distracted because he is a lunatic behind the wheel when he's watching the road and not racing to get a camera to capture evidence of something we know was not supposed to be there. We weere in the car for about 45 seconds and nearing the U-turn to go back when the lights started popping off. Some would flicker and fade, then come back, then go altogether. The red and green/blues seemed to come together and then go. Less and less of the white flashes were visible. We were coming into a more ligthed area, so I thought for a second that that was the problem. However, as we got into a little bit of a darker area (between us and the cluster) we could see that there were definatley less lights, and withing another 10 seconds we were down to one final white light that was no longer flashing, but pulsed out one final time and then there was notheing but the orange-pink haze and the outling of a nearby mountain. SO,,, am I crazy, is there another explanation, because we are not making this up, and I've seen enough of our own manmade stuff to know that this wasn't.((NUFORC Note: Witness indicates that the date of the incident is approximate, even though the event had occurred less than a week earlier. PD))