2001-11-18 - Aurora, CO - Light

Blinking white light moving unnaturally

Myself, my wife, and a good friend of ours drove out as far east as we could get on Smoky Hill Road to escape the light pollution of the city to watch the Leonoid meteor shower. As we arrived, the sky was a mostly cloudy but we hoped it would clear. It was very cold (mid 30's Fareheit) outside. As we sat in the car, we were facing directly east. As we were looking for meteors, my wife commented that all she saw was an airplane "or something" just above the horizon, due east of us. When she mentioned it, we started observing it also.

It was too far away from us to make out any details of a craft. I can only guess, but I'd say it was ~5 miles away from us. It was a white light, looked about the intensity of landing lights on a commercial airliner. It was blinking very rapidly with a very consistent strobe-like rhythm. The strobe frequency seemed almost like an everyday jetliner, however it lacked the tell-tale red nav light on the top. Since we couldn't see any meteors due to the clouds, we watched it for a bit. The light moved a bit from the north to the south (approximately 3-4 degrees) and maintained what appeared to be a very low altitude. I guessed it might be a car driving up a road and the headlights appearing to pulsate due to roadside trees crossing their path. Just as I said this, the light jumped straight up ~10 degrees above the horizon. The movement was deliberate and VERY swift. This was certainly not a car and no aircraft that I've ever seen could have ascended this quickly. It moved an apparent 5 degrees in much less than a second.

We were somewhat surprised at this movement, but as we are all fairly skeptical and scientific minds, we again guessed this must have been some sort of aircraft. As we watched it began to move south, but as it moved, it bounced up and down very, very quickly. Again, I can't stress enough that common airplanes or helicopters do not move this fast or in this fashion. As it headed south it slowed dramatically and then headed north again, it appeared not to even stop when changing direction. It accellerated just as quickly as it decellerated after reversing direction. This change of direction was simply amazing. It seemed to have the dexterity of a small insect. It moved up and down and north to south for several minutes as we watched in awe, all the time trying to understand what the heck we were watching. I suppose the natural thing to do is to try and explain it away, but there was nothing that we could think of that could maneuver like this.

After a few minutes of this, it travelled deliberately south/southwest of us and passed behind a hill that obscured our vision. The other side of the hill that we could see was the town of Parker, which had many lights of its own and made it difficult to track. We saw many lights that seemed to match this one, but couldn't be sure as they didn't appear to move.

We stayed for three hours at that location and eventually saw the meteors. The light we were watching was very clearly *not* a meteor.