2004-04-26 - Olympia, WA - Light

5 objects over Olympia, WA chasing each other while turning into bright concentrated balls of light then to nothing.

I was cooking at the restaurant where I work and I noticed that none of the cooks were on line, so I went out back looking for them and they were all staring at these 5 bright lights that would go from not being visible to being a bright ball of concentrated light, no flickering. They did this in a very random pattern. Sometimes they would all light up individually at different times and sometimes two or three or four of them would all light up together in different hovering positions in the sky. Not predictable at all. One of the other cooks said that they were lighting up and then flying around each other in ways that airplanes or helicopters couldn't. He said, "It looked like they were playing tag." When I saw them they were very stationary or after some time they would slowly change their positions, but then stop and hover again doing their light show. Their numbers went from 5 of them and about 20-30 minutes later I went out back with our dishwasher and saw one remaining, but faint. We were looking to the North from downtown Olympia by the Farmer's Market on the water. They also seemed to be in the flight path of airplanes flying into Sea-Tac. Pilots must have seen something weird... Right before they would lost all their light, I could see a very tiny object behind the light and I would say it was saucer shaped, although it looked very far away right before it disappeared. When they would light up though, they were bright. Not a star in the sky at the time, you could only see the moon and these things lit up brighter and with more intensity and solid white light than anything I've seen in the sky. A good handful of customers saw them as well. One guy even called up our local paper here, the Olympian, to tell them what was going on. He said he is in the military and had never seen anything like that so he called it in. I checked after the sun went down and I didn't see anything. I think that their light came from the sun, because the sun was directly behind us whil! e looking at them. As the sun went down, the less and less intense the lights became. Like they had as much light to show us as the sun had to give them. They were brighter than any airplane light, planet or even Venus right now. It was rad.