2009-10-19 - Sidney, TX - Light

Phoenix-like event, 40 miles from Stephenville, TX--brief lights, 6-9: 6 hovering formation, 3 individual seperate, military jets.

On the evening of 19-Oct-2009 I was outside after dark testing a propane heater for winter camping use. Time was approximately 2030 hours, CDT, US. My attention was drawn to the clear night sky by the noise/flashing lights of what were obviously military jets, about a half dozen of them, very high up.

Military jets are a common sight here, originating usually from a major Air Force base about 70 miles east of where I live. Daytime flight training activity is pretty heavy usually. However, nighttime military activity is rare, especially a half dozen jets that seemed to be canvasing many miles of the sky—they were visible essentially horizon to horizon, passing overhead and making broad, sweeping maneuvers.

I was curious so I sat down and watched. As I was watching one jet, going west to east, approximately 70 degrees from horizontal, a nearly linear pattern of amber-to-red lights appeared about 50 degrees from horizontal, south-southeast. There were about a half dozen of them that rapidly ramped up in brightness (not instantaneous). They were stationary and maintained a fixed pattern, no variation in relative position.

The pattern was about thumb’s width at arm’s length.

There was a slight warbling in intensity of most of these lights, similar to distant lights on a hot night-heat distortion. It was a similar effect, but I’m not saying that is what it was because it was a chilly night.

After a few seconds of visibility the lights faded about half as fast as they had ramped up—about three seconds to completely black out. They did not fade all at once, but in a random pattern. Of course, there was no noise except from the distant jets.

About a minute later there were two or three individual lights that appeared, then disappeared, in about the same manner. These were east-southeast at about 30 degrees from horizontal. These were not all stationary while they were visible, and were visible only one at a time.

I ran inside, called my parents, and asked dad to walk outside (we live only about 30 yards apart), which he did and he later said he saw one of the lights. I’m not sure he did. From the direction he said he was looking he could not have seen what I was seeing east-southeast, but he could have be observing similar lights further to the west which I would not have seen because I was watching the east-southeast lights.

The canvasing activity of the jets continued for as long I was willing to watch, about 30 minutes.

From the video I have seen of the Phoenix Lights phenomenon, this event was quite similar in the way the lights ramped up, warbled in intensity, and faded out. In fact, these could very well have been flares, which was the “official explanation” of the Phoenix event. All I can say is if these were flares someone is damn good at placing a group of 6 and having them appear to be “tied together” on a structure or separate and holding a rock-solid pattern for several seconds.