2008-11-18 - Pittsburgh, PA - Fireball

Bright orange ball of fire hovers then snapped back up into the atmosphere at a high rate of speed

On Tuesday November 18, 2008 I decided to go back to my mothers’ home, the home I grew up in, after I left work at 8:00pm. She resides in Upper St. Clair, PA, a quiet suburb south of Pittsburgh. I arrived at her home about twenty after eight in the evening. There was a very light snow on the ground. I went to the house, let myself in and found her in the kitchen. After making some coffee and sitting in the kitchen talking for about a half an hour, she went upstairs to change from her work clothes into her pajamas. I went to use the upstairs bathroom. The bathroom faces the front of the house and the road. She lives on a very quiet road with very little traffic, but numerous homes. Behind the house is a very dense wooded area that prohibits any light from coming up the hill from the road below. The road behind the house is about a ¼ mile from our home.

I was using the bathroom sitting on the toilet when I heard her go down the stairs. As I was finishing up, I glanced through the venetian blinds as I have a millions times in the past when I was younger. What I saw has occupied all of my time awake and while asleep for the last 24 hours. The shadow of her home was cast on the snow, a perfect silhouette. No car lights would have been able to accomplish this because of how steep the hill and how dense the woods are behind the house, even with sparse leaves on the branches. I yanked up my pants up, zipper down and shirt untucked and bolted down the stairs. My mother was frozen like a statue staring out the back window.

What we saw at that point we will remember for the rest of our lives. In the sky only about 10 yards above the tree line, there hovered a perfectly quiet but blazing ball of orange light. I would estimate it to be about 15-20 yards in width. Not oval or cylindrical, but perfectly round. It was very strong and not pulsating or shifting. It was not blinding us at all. I looked back at the front window, this time from the family room and still saw the house silhouetted on the snow. I continued to stare out the back door that leads that leads to the raised porch as I opened the door. No sound, no heat, no vibration just this spectacular ball of light as I stood on the porch. I ran back in to get a camera down in the game room on the basement level. As I ran to the back door under the porch, the ball became smaller and smaller as it seemed to be yanked back into the sky at an extremely rapid pace. I never got a shot off. I didn’t have time to turn the camera on unfortunately.

Today, she asked the next door neighbors, who are an older couple, they saw nothing. Nor did a woman she knows through church who lives on the hillside about 1 mile away from our home, directly behind the house. I believe what we witnessed was not of this world. This was certainly not a noisy helicopter or some child playing a prank. This was a real, tangible, perfectly silent ball of orange fire well above the tree line. If anyone in this area had a similar encounter from the evening of 11/18/08 I would be highly interested in hearing your account of that evening. Can anyone help us understand this?