UFO orbs appear during intense MCV thunderstormI'm senior in college at Missouri State University. I was sleeping in because it was dead day, Friday May 8, which is always study day the Friday before finals. I was woken up by tornado sirens and a really terrible thunderstorm at 9am. The power was also out. We get really bad thunderstorms but this one took the cake. From www.weather.com/newscenter/stormwatch/: "MCV becomes - Inland Hurricane: May 8, 2009 brought a derecho, a widespread windstorm associated with a bow echo thunderstorm complex, along a 600-mile-long, 60-mile wide swath across southeast KS, south MO, and south IL. Many of the damaging winds were not with the leading line of severe thunderstorm, but rather behind it and beneath a mid-level rotation center called an MCV - mesoscale convective vortex. Winds gusted to 106 mph. At least 220,000 customers lost power in MO and IL. The system spawned more than 30 tornadoes, at 20 of them in southwest MO. EF3 tornadoes hit Howell County MO and Garrard County KY." This storm was crazy. It was pounding my off campus apartment. I could hear pieces of metal siding being ripped off the building. It was the weirdest thing...the winds were blowing straight at the building, driving the rain around the edges of the sliding glass door and spraying my living room with water. I was freaking out. It was very intense, and I was frantically trying to figure out how to keep the water out. The winds began to calm down a bit, and I was running around my apartment trying to find the memory card to my camera. I'm a sort of an amateur meteorologist and love taking storm photos. I'm a photography and graphic design major, and I have a Canon 40d with a number of lenses, including a solid zoom 100-400mm L. However, I couldn't find my 16gb memory card and nearly ripped my apartment apart trying to find it. I couldn't even find my backup 4gb card, which was odd, because its always in my bag. After several minutes of frantic searching, I stopped for some reason, in my living room, turned to my right, and out the back sliding glass door window was the weirdest sight. It was like an orb shaped thing, combined with a fireball, perhaps a few miles in the distance hovering beyond the middle school behind my apartment. It was really weird because it seemed to be wiggly...like it had waves coming off of it that were vibrating. It was bright white, and the edges seemed to be yellowish orange. The first thing I thought was that something exploded in mid air, and this is where my memory is a little fuzzy because I'm reporting this many months later (which I'll explain soon). I'm pretty sure that another one appeared on the sides of it, which made me think it was an aircraft. Sometimes aircraft fly under thunderstorms to avoid the dangerous updrafts. But the way the lights radiated was just too weird. Then they each disappeared, one by one, quickly. What ticked me ! off the most was that even though I had my camera around my neck, I couldn't take a photo! Gaaahh! Ridiculous. So I grab my iPhone, text my fiance and roommate to tell them what happened, and then looked up Springfield's airport website to find arrival / departure times. There were no planes landing near the time that I saw the lights, and Springfield, being a small town of 150k, it doesn't get many large aircraft landing during the day. Also the lights didn't seem to be moving in any direction, and if they were coming head on, that wouldn't make any sense either, because the airport is on the NE fringe of town and I was right in the middle of town, and even though its a small town, its spread out over 88 square miles because they don't know how to build up in these small towns. The other explanation would be ball lightning, which hasn't been scientifically proven to exist, but has been observed by many people in the past. So here is some background info on why I'm posting this so far after the fact: tonight I was watching UFO Hunters on the History channel and they showed these orbs on there that have been occuring in the Ozarks around Springfield this year and some of the video and artist's renditions looked a lot like what I saw and it freaked me out. I didn't get the same feeling of dread when I saw it that other people have reported, but I did feel like I was frozen and couldn't move. It was pretty wild. They also reported about a light on the north side of town, and I also believe I have seen this light before when driving back in forth to Bolivar, MO to see my friends at SBU. It just seems too bright and out of place for that area of the sky and I only notice it sometimes. I feel like I have a fairly solid grasp of astronomy, having taken a college course where we had to learn about heavenly objects and went out to Baker Observatory (which ironically is near Marshfield, where on UF! O hunters a highway patrolman reported an orb following him) on several occasions to observe the night sky. My dad was also an amateur astronomer when I was younger and we would go outside and look at the stars frequently. I'm also not a crazy UFO person, but a fairly rational college student. However, I feel like I have some sort of odd connection with UFOs. When I was in elementary school I would have horrible horrible night terrors of being abducted by aliens and when I was in 10th grade, I had another encounter I'd like to share. Feel free to remove this for the reporting post but I want to submit it along with this for completeness: My best friend and I were driving home late on a Thursday night from the movies near midnight, which was my curfew in 10th grade. My best friend is very smart, an Eagle Scout and a member of the Stretch program at school for highly intelligent students. We were both in advanced placement programs for math and literature. Since it was so long ago (2001-2002?) I can't remember the date at all. We were waiting at a red light at 7hwy and 40hwy in Blue Springs, MO, a suburb of Kansas City. We saw three orb lights, in a triangle formation, float over the HyVee grocery store, turn while crossing 40hwy, and then float over the WalMart. Then they suddenly zoomed off at incredibly high speed in the direction of my house. The way they moved made us feel like they were attached. Both of us saw the lights and were a bit freaked out. That's when things started to get really crazy. As we continued down 40 hwy and the other two roads [road names REDACTED, since it's near my parent! s house], nearly every single street light we passed by suddenly went out. It was making us very scared, especially since we were in a convertible. My friend pulled into the circle drive I lived on, and dropped me off at the bottom of the driveway. Before getting out, I noted that it was 11:55pm, before curfew, since I was worried about getting back in time. When I got inside, my dad half-joked that I was late (it wasn't a serious violation) and I said "What are you talking about?" I looked at the time and it was 12:05am. I was so confused. How did it take me 10 minutes to walk inside? I went straight inside. So I talked to my friend the next day and he told me something pretty interesting (and scary). Apparently when he was at the stop sign to leave my circle drive, he saw a bright flash in his rear view mirror. He turns around, and he said he couldn't see me anywhere. He then drove away quickly, which at the time ticked me off that he just left me like that. ! That about freaked the hell out of me. I've only told these stories to a few people, but figured that I might as well come forward now. I bet there are a lot of normal people out there, like me, who would never google UFO reports and actually type up something like this and send it in because they would think that they must be crazy. But I am starting to think that there is something to this whole UFO thing and that if I didn't share this, then I wouldn't be helping anyone figure out what's going on. I also got my accurate times for the first report from the messaging app on my iPhone. I sent the text to my fiance right after the event (and I also sent her one right after I awoke to tornado sirens, she lived in the Kansas City area at the time) and it was logged in the app. Honestly, I have no idea what's going on, but its starting to freak me out a bit that stuff that I've seen is showing up on TV in the town I live in when I thought that there must be a rational explanation. I just can't get my mind aroun! d the idea that there are aliens flying around the earth. It just doesn't seem possible. I just thought that was something to be scared of as a child, like monsters or the boogie man. If it's proven that aliens are real, then it's going to be really hard for me to deal with that. It just doesn't make sense! Why would they even appear like this or take people? What is the motive? Are they bored? Why not just come down and show themselves? Are they just having fun with us? It is so weird that other people have seen something similar to what I saw. It is even more weird that there have been enough people seeing things that a UFO tv show came to this town to interview people. I wish they would go away because now I'm fearful of their presence and my possible connection to them. Also my mom told me a couple years ago that my grandpa used to see ufos, strage lights, and would awake in the middle of the night, at the window, sleepwalking, talking to them outside the w! indow. My mom saw a ufo with them when she was younger, hover! ing over a car in a parking lot late one night. That was probably sometime in the late 70s early 80s. Is there something about my family that attracts them? Or is it a coincidence? Sorry for the rambling, I've got a huge project due in the morning and it's getting late! Time to get back to work...feel free to edit this to make it more cohesive for online consumption. Thanks for your time.