2009-06-10 - Roswell, NM - Sphere

Single UFO flying at night splits into 2, then regroups back into 1 in skies over the desert near Roswell, NM

On Wednesday June 10th 2009, while vacationing in NM from CA, a friend and I were traveling west from ROSWELL towards CHACO CANYON NATIONAL HISTORIC PARK via ALBUQUERQUE on US 70. That day, we decided to follow a route via US 380 West towards the town of SOCORRO, searching for any available lodging on route. After securing a room at a local motel in the town of CAPITAN, we decided to go for a ride later on after dinner and check out the stars that night by the desert. We had experienced some overcast weather earlier in the day and the skies had turned clear enough to do so by evening. Somewhere around 8:00 pm we found NM State 234 on our GPS, and we decided to head for awhile on this road eastbound (and towards ROSWELL in Lincoln County).

NM STATE 230 is a 2 way road which appeareed to be mostly used by local traffic during the day and not a very busy road at all in the night. There are no light poles to illuminate the way once you've entered the desert and sometime after dusk (between 8:45 PM and 9:10 PM) the night fell quickly, and eeringly dark. I engaged my vehicle's high beam lights in order to better see the road, road markers & reflectors, and also had to slow down sufficiently enough below the posted speed limits (45 & 50) in order to also avoid hitting any of the abundant indigenous wild life we encountered through out most of our entire trip that night. In the 2.5 hour ride we'd traveled on this road, no other vehicles were encountered in either direction (nor could any be seen at a far distance in the mostly flat landscape).

Sometime around 9:00 PM we reached an area somewhere in between mile markers 41 & 42 on STATE 230, at which point we decided not to continue any further in that direction. After doing a U-turn to head back westbound, I parked the car just on the shoulder of the road at mile marker 41. I turned off the engine, radio and lights, and sat we sat inside the car talking with my friend in total darkness & silence. We commented on how dark it had gotten on that crisp, clear and moonless night (up to that point...the moon rose up later on around 10:05 or so). Our plan qas to get our vision aclimated to the dark, and then get out of the car and look up at the constellations.

However, before we even got a chance to set a foot outside on the ground. At approximately 9:10 PM (and with barely a hint of western dusk light left on the horizon...the eastern skies were already dark & starry!), we both noticed an object about the size of a bayer aspirin traveling hurridly miles above in the skies. We couldn't make out it's shape or outline at all, as it had a very bright and steady glowing orange to reddish light. At first, I thought it may have been either a lear jet, or military aircraft traveling typically in a straight path, with a north-east to east bound trajectory heading, at a 30 degree angle above both the barely visible horizon, and the distant western mountain range beyond.

I am well familiar with many aircrafts used by our military, having served in both the: USMC & the USCG. So it seemed something rather odd that this craft was traveling that at night with no other type of fuselage lights "ON", nor did it produce any familiar distant sounds, like those from a jet or rotor engines.

I was just about to calmy say something to my friend, when at that very same moment he bursted out saying: "What is that in the sky?"..."do you see it?" No sooner did he asked... when suddenly the object disappeared, vanishing in what we'd estimated to be 5-6 seconds. Then, suddenly it re-appeared again further along on the same path, at what seemed tome to be 2-3 clicks east of it's last position. Suddenly, the object cleanly splits into 2 (two) objects (each retaining its original orangish-reddish color light), both objects then travelled parallel to the other at first. Quickly separating or widening apart in a sort of an arc fashion, then suddenly both objects did something bizzare: each dove right into each other, rejoining and giving the appearance as if both lights had "MELTED" or morphed back into 1(one)single object---immediatelly after completing this "maneuver", it completely "vanished" into thin air and it did not reappear again anywhere in the skies.

There was absolutely no sound or echo indicating an explosion or collision, there were no visible trails, or "hot" sparks/debris falling anywhere on the ground landscape, nor could we see any surface fire coming out of the desert landscape below at that distance thereafter, which would've indicated any sort of accident happening in the skies and over that part of the desert.

My friend and I sat there for about 5-10 minutes both, perplexed and excited at what we'd seen. We asked ourselves a number of questions in an attempt to make sense of what we'd witnessed (i.e.: was it fireworks?...was it a satellite?...could it have been spotlights...missiles?) but, we couldn't arrive at a rational answer on what we saw that night. The entire episode lasted approximately 30 seconds and although I had a digital camera with me, unfortunately I could not retrieve it out of it's case, and power it up quickly enough to capture the event in the limited time as it happened. Afterwards, we started the engine, and quickly got back on the road back to our motel.