1979-05-06 - Panama City Beach, FL - Light

Five bright lights or glowing oval objects hovered over the horizon south of Panama City Beach, FL, during Memorial Day 1979.

It was around Memorial Day Weekend, 1979, when my immediate family gathered at our newly built beach house on Spyglass Drive in PCB. It was right after dinner, the sun had been down for an hour or two. Through the living room picture window, I noticed a bright light hovering--actually descending slowly at about 70 degrees until it reached the horizon. It seemed to light up the ocean below it and it glowed intensely. Then another bright light appeared in the same place high up in the night sky and began to slide toward the first one.

I called them to the attention of my family--who continued watching TV. So I went outside, on the balcony, and was surprised at the brightness of the two lights (the picture windows had darkly tinted glass). I looked at them and decided they were the perfect subject to test some new Kodacolor 400 ASA film I had just purchased. I was into photography then and had a nice Minolta.

I shot between eight and ten exposures bracketting around a second each. I am attaching two I recently scanned.

In a matter of half an hour there were five bright lights hovering over the horizon, as you can see in the top photograph. The little vertical lines under each light are the result of my moving the camera slightly during exposure. The photo below, which may be the first one in the series, accurately reflects their "shape".

My father, mother, brother, sister and brother-in-law came out to see them. We all wondered what they could be. Helicopters? The night was silent but for the murmur of the rolling waves. My brother-in-law went to the piano and played the five first notes of the "Close Encounters" theme by John Williams.

We saw the neighbors coming outside also and asked them what they thought the lights were. The lady said we should tune in the local TV news at eleven. "They will have the answer," she said.

In about 45 minutes the lights went back up into the sky. One at a time, but faster than they came down. We want inside to watch the news but they were not mentioned. So I called the NBC station and they didn't know anything about any lights. They suggested I should call Tyndall Airforce Base--which I did; but no one there had an explanation for whatever it was that we saw.

The next morning I asked everyone if I had dreamt the thing about the lights. No, I hadn't. But nobody really wanted to talk about it. I kept insisting. My father said: "We're near the Air Force Base. They test things all the time." For a while I showed the photos to friends and told the story. Then they were put away. I just came across them again and scanned those two when I went looking for family photos for a web page project.

I'm sorry that the files are big, but if ever resolution mattered, it's in these cases, no? I also have the negatives which may contain more picture information. Any one interested in this? Any one knows what we saw?

((NUFORC Note: Date is approximate. PD))