Let me start by saying that I am studying to become an aerospace engineer and am fairly knowledgeable about astronomy, types of aircraft, and how to identify them. This is where the story begins. One clear night (early June, around the 5th or 6th), I was walking back from the bars to my apartment with two of my good friends. In order to get to our apartments, the end of our journey requires that we follow a road that goes over a small hill. When we crested the hill and were heading down to our apartments on the other side, one of my friends said there were bright lights in the sky. We all look up (more like ahead and slightly up) to see four very bright yellow/orange balls of light. These objects looked as if they were on the same vertical plane and were very similar in brightness to some farther off street lights. As we are all gaping at the lights, trying to understand what were are seeing, they start to slowly rotate in a clockwise direction. Their original distances away from each other start to slightly change as well, distorting the imaginary shape these points of light created. After I shut my mouth, I realize that I should be recording this somehow and reach for my phone. My intention was to attempt a video recording of the lights. When I open the camera on my phone I accidentally take a rough picture of three of the objects. Then I quickly change to video mode and start recording the four objects we are observing. I start zoomed in and the objects appear clearly and very close to a street light (from our perspective). This street light is only a fraction brighter than how some of the objects appear. Note that I was recording on my Samsung Galaxy S4. This is a fairly good camera during daylight hours but just like any cell phone camera, fails to work in the dark. Even the fact that my camera can pick up these objects show how bright they are. Because of the light pollution the street lights around us create, no stars are visible, but the objects still are visible to us. Then I zoom the camera back out(I'm not sure why) and take in the entire event as it unfolds. The quality of the video suffers because I am not always focusing on where my camera is pointing. The longer the video goes, the less time I am actually capturing the objects for I run farther up the street and to my demise, directly below a streetlight. The voices myself and my two friends can be heard with their exclamations. I actually hate listening to the video because at the time I was buzzed and sound like an idiot, trying to explain to my friends that the lights are no mere airplane. Then I stop the video to run the very short distance to my apartment to retrieve my DSLR camera and get my roommate to come out and watch. My friends all followed in pursuit of me and for the next minute I am scrambling to find my camera. In my frantic, very quick search, I can't find my camera and we all decide to run back out as see if the objects are still there. By the time we got back out to the street, the lights have all disappeared. The total time it took us to run inside and back out was less that a couple minutes. Disappointed, we walk back inside and discuss what we saw. We all agreed that we have never seen anything like it and watched the video I took and looked at the photo multiple times. Shocked and tired, we parted for the night and went to bed. The next day we went talked through the event again to make sure that we all saw the same thing and we weren't dreaming. To this day we are certain we saw a group of unidentified-flying-objects. They did not resemble a plane, helicopter, satellite, or any other air-born technologies that we are familiar to. To make it clear, there was no noise being emitted by these objects, for the night was perfectly silent. These objects must have been very large and far away, or closer and smaller than realized and perfectly silent. Note that the area the lights appeared over was farmland and very scarcely populated. The lights appeared over a large wheat field of the Palouse.

Images

‹ ›