2001-11-24 - Tionesta, PA - Light

A storm was moving in that evening, and we watched what first looked like someone shining a spotlight into the sky. This is what we thought it was until we realized that these lights were moving very rapidly behind the clouds in the west and north.

These lights, sometimes alone sometimes multiple, seemed to be chasing each other "playing or dancing", changing colors from white to red, then yellow, then green and blue. The colors were not bright, but muted or pastel. My husband had the impression of children playing tag. They moved fairly fast from south to north, skimming the edges of the clouds at the edge of the storm front, "peeking" through the clouds in the north, but most of the activity was in the western quadrant. We live in an isolatd forest area 12 miles from town. These lights continued intermittenly for aprox 6 hours. Myself, my husband and two house guests also observed the lights. Three of us are of American Indian decent. My husband and I also observed a similar light object, orange and yellow and red, in Aug 1996, in the west sky at aprox 8 pm EST. I am having a hard time describing what we saw, because the words don't fit the vision. If you could imagine a flash light being shown through a prism, so that as the light moved it also changed color, only on a much larger scale. There was no definate shape, just and eliptical light source. Since the sun had already set, I ruled out the possibility of sun rays through the clouds producing a sort of rainbow, but rainbows don't flitter across the sky from south to north. My husband's impression was that the movement was not random, but controled.