SIGHTING: KENNEWICK, WA

Witness Testimony

" Orange color oval with light on top and many lights on the bottom very distant through a telescope.UFO report of sighting 8-11-16. The purpose of this report is to identify objects that I have seen through my telescope, and not to claim a sighting of extraterrestrial aircraft.On August 11, 2016, at 8:10 pm I observed a bright spot in the sky with my naked eye that was obviously not a star as the stars were not visible this early in the evening. After a few minutes I realized what I was seeing was not something I have seen before so I shot a picture and a short video with my cell phone and got my wife to come outside to have a look also.Using a 7x35 binocular I was able to resolve the object into a disc shape but no other detail was visible. I set up my C-8 Celestron telescope to have a better look. The object resolved into an orange color object that was oval shape, had a flashing light on top, was rimmed with what appeared to be many lights around the circumference of the bottom side that were dimmer than the light on top, and seemed translucent like a fabric.After a few minutes of observing, I attached a video camera to the telescope and recorded a few minutes of video in two recordings. After bumping my telescope I was not able to find the object again as it was getting farther away and dimmer during the observation.The video capture settings, frame rate at .844 per sec. is to slow to stop movement so there is some motion blur in the images but enough detail to see structure of the object. The orange color had faded to whitish purple by the time I got the video recording. I do not see the lights that were around the bottom of the object in the video image that I saw through the eyepiece of the telescope.The sighting lasted from 8:10 pm to 8:53 pm about 43 minutes until I lost sight of it. The direction of travel was southeast, and the object got smaller by about half and was viewed by me and my wife, before I went to video capture.My telescope was hastily set up and there were no stars to polar align the mount so the tracking is off a little with respect to the stars. The tracking motor is running at sidereal rate and I used the manual slow motion controls to center the object when it ran out of the field of view. I have been using this telescope for 18 years and this camera for only a few times. I am experienced with deep sky astrophotography with several camera types and several telescope types for 17 years.Technical information: Telescope, Celestron C-8 telescope, 200mm mirror f/10 with f/3.3 focal reducer. Calculated focal length 686 mm.Camera, ZWO ASI 120 MC color video camera with 3.5 x 3.5 micron pixels, 1280x960 image size.Capture at .844 frames per second. All technical data is available. Approximately 420 frames of data available with object visible. Two video files 903 MB and 893 MB. Three still captures from video.Approximate RA 21h 46m, DEC 9 deg.. "