1992-10-10 - Panama City, FL - Formation

During a road trip to Panama City a friend and I witnessed a pair of luminous light formations appear and dissappear over the Gulf.

This was years ago, so my memory of exact times and dates may be assumed to be a "best guess" but all details of the objects, and their behavior are still completely clear in my mind. A close friend and I had been working our tails off all year without a break, as we were both enrolled in the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and he(my friend) was also employed as the assistant to the broadcasting(mass comm) department(in which I was taking classes at the time), and in addition we produced a public access cable show in our spare time, which there was little of. In short, we needed a break, and thought it would make an interesting show if we documented ourselves winning the florida state lottery, so we used the show as an excuse for a road trip, and took one of the department's cameras with us (no, we didn't expect to win, but if we had it would've made great television). So after a long drive from Birmingham, and a long afternoon of filling out lottery tickets, neither of us wanted to drive back, so we found a cheap motel, and put away our stuff to stay the night. It was about 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon when we both went out to the beach behind our hotel, and plopped down into a pair of those wooden beach chairs, and admired the calm sea, making small talk as the sun sank to the horizon. I don't recall which of us saw it first, because at first we didn't think anything of it, as there had been planes in the sky all day, and this seemed at the outset to be just an oddly-colored set of airplane lights. Although after about 15 or 20 minutes the lights hadn't moved, and we both took notice then. There were two rows of lights, the top row was an arc of four (reddish-violet in color)and were larger (not brighter) than the bottom row of three (bright yellow) they were arranged like this: O O