2005-01-10 - Fortescue, NJ - Circle

Light with erratic flight pattern

My boyfriend and I had taken a trip down to Fortescue beach, which is very quiet during the winter months. At night you can see the lights of Dover Airforce Base across the Delaware Bay. We were just standing on the beach talking and as I always do I was looking up. The sky seemed to be very active with planes, and I am always on the lookout, epecially on Fortescue beach, perhaps to just to catch a glimpse of a low flying plane heading in or out of DAB. We were on the beach or sitting nearby from about 6:30 until 7:30PM It was already dark.

My boyfriend is a skeptic and has never in his 51 years seen anything that he could call a UFO.

The temperature was about 40 degrees with no wind. There were some low altitude patchy clouds that seem to be making their way out as I was seeing more and more stars. There was a slight amount of haziness to the atmosphere, perhaps later in the evening it would turn foggy, but Dover was still visable.

I was watching one light that was about 30 degrees up from the horizon, waiting for it to turn enough or for it to get closer so that I could see the strobe lights blinking and confirm that it was indeed an airplane. It was white, perhaps a slightly yellow color. It was out over the water, apparently and about 20 degrees right of the last row of visible lights at Dover. I was facing for the most part West, perhaps slightly South. I watched the light move at a what seemed a normal speed for a plane, moving "right." I noticed what seemed like some irregularity in it's speed as it continued moving to the right. It seemed to slow and speed up slightly, but it was not very obvious. It then shot up and to the right slightly and very quickly at about a 70 degree angle of accent and about five degrees up. I then alerted my boyfriend who had been looking elsewhere, never taking my eyes off of it. We both then saw it move right and slightly up a few more degrees more quickly than the first time I had seen it, but it's erractic speed was more apparent. It then shot down at about a 45 degree angle with the erractic speed still visible, even though it was moving quickly, only going a few more degrees and then it turned a sharp "v" turn, maybe 15 degrees from being directly vertical and much more quickly than before, shot up, got about ten degrees and disappeared apparently into the low lying clouds. We looked for it, but it was gone. We watched the sky for half an hour more but never saw anything else like it.

I had a similar experience about a year ago, listed on this website, in Millville, New Jersey, which is about ten miles away.

About fifteen minutes later we had gotten in the car to get warm and were still watching the sky. We saw coming at us another light, but saw the strobe lights, from the same area of the sky as the unexplained light. We watched it for less than a minute and we could tell it was headed straight for us, guessing I would say a few thousand feet up. I watched the white part of the light "turn" and get very bright as if a helicopter had made a turn to go right at us. But it was still too far out to hear the engine. The light "turned on a dime" and we both agreed at that point that it had to be a chopper. It headed over us within a minute, seemed to be roughly a thousand feet up or more, and we could hear the engine of what sounded like a prop plane, and not a helicopter. I'm not an expert on planes, but we both got the feeling that we were being checked out, and just assumed that it would be a helicopter, epecially the way it appeared to make a turn directly toward us without having to "circle around" like a plane. Perhaps the light "turning to face us" makes sense to others who will read this.

There are several houses near the beach but there were only two homes that appeared to be occupied with full time residents. The road along the beach was otherwise empty of cars.

We have discussed making further observations at this location and I will further document any occurances here.