1981-05-09 - Scottsdale, AZ - Fireball

An orange fireball above our backyard

I'm not sure what month it was, nor the day. Even the year is foggy. But I do remember my brother had left for college, so I must have been a Junior in high school. I had shelves built in to the wall at the foot of my bed. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, I awoke to a crashing sound on my floor. I leapt out of bed, headed for the light switch, and flipped it on while runningout the door (feared the boogie man). As I tried to excape, I ran into my mom who was standing just outside my bedroom door. She scared me half to death too, since her room was on the opposite end of the house...and she was not the type to check and see what went boom in the night. I couldn't figure out how she got there so quickly. I then turned around, out of breath, to see what the noise was. My shelves had fallen to the floor with all the books, etc... Relieved, I said, something to the effect of, "Oh, thank God, it was just my books. I flipped off the switch and went back to bed, leaving my mom in the doorway. She turned the light back on and said, Karen, look out your window, in a monotonous tone. Now, this is coming from a hyper melodramatic woman. Again, "Karen, look out your window." I yelled back like the brat that I was, "Mom, it was just my books, I'm trying to sleep. I'll clean it up tomorrow. Now, turn off my light!" And she repeated herself again, "Karen, look out your window." This went on a couple of more times, until I huffed and crawled to the end of my bed, opened the blinds and said, "What?" At that very moment, I saw a huge fireball about a hundred yards above our back yard. It was partically over ours, and the house behind us. I was wowed, and instantly thought that we should call somebody, but I didn't know who. Just to report it, or to see if someone else had seen it, or, I thought, perhaps it was there just for us. I wasn't afriad of it. I thought it was cool. She said that there was no point in calling,that no one would believe us, or someon else would have called in by then. She said, "Yeah, I've been watching it for hours. It hovering above our yard like that, then it just... and at that very instant, it seemed to respond to her words. It took off way across the infinite skyline and became the size of a pea, then it zoomed all over the sky and soon anough came back to our backyard, only slightly higher and further away this time. I ended up getting in my moms bed with her so that I could watch it through binoculars out her sliding glass doors. It didn't look like fire through the binoculars. It was not of this earth. I frustrated me, because I wanted to label it, even the colour seemed to change to various shades of orange. I'm not sure, but I think I remember seeing a little red. The colour hovered around the ball, like a tangile hue. I watched it for hours. I oinged all over the sky, then land slightly further away, over and over and over, until I fell asleep. I never talked about it again, my mom and I never spoke of it. Many years later, whenI was about thirty, I called my mom after years of not speaking to her. I asked for two things; 1) my birth certificate and 2) I wanted to know about what she saw. She said, oh, that thing. Who knows what that was. It could have been anything. HALLO!!!!!