2009-11-26 - Normantown, WV - Unknown

Stationary, star-like white lights suddenly approached and passed directly overhead

After finishing Thanksgiving dinner, I stepped out on my parents' front porch to smoke. It was dark, chilly, calm, and the sky was partially clear. I am an avid stargazer and am very familiar with the night sky in all seasons, and particularly with the night sky in this little valley. We do have very dark skies here. So I was just surveying the sky, running through the visible constellations, when I noticed two pure white "stars" relatively low in the northwest, apparent magnitude of 2 or 3--about equivalent in brightness to the stars in the Big Dipper--and separated by less than 1/2 degree (less than the width of the full moon. At that point they looked completely star-like. The puzzling aspect was that they should not have been there, as I knew from long experience that there were no bright stars in that region of the sky at that time of year. A kind of inner "alarm" went off in me telling me to pay attention.

No sooner had I thought that than the white lights began to move toward the house at a fairly rapid clip. It took me a few seconds to believe my eyes and be convinced that these "stars" were actually moving. I quickly went back in the house and called my family out to see this. My mother and father, my adult daughter, and three of my teenage children came outside and we went into the front yard. The lights were bigger, brighter, moving in tandem, and coming very close but no longer moving at high speed. I should note here that in late November in West Virginia, the nights are very quiet out here in the country. There are no insects, frogs or birds calling, and no man-made noise. The lights passed directly overhead and appeared to be fairly low, but the curious thing to me was that I could not discern the shape, or even if it was one craft or two. All I could see were these two pure white lights. When they were passing overhead they were separated by about 6-8 full moon widths (3-4 degrees). I have to emphasize that on this perfectly quiet country night, there was absolutely no sound as these lights passed low and directly overhead. They continued on in a straight line until they passed over the hill to the northeast and disappeared from view. From the time the family got to the yard to the time whatever it was disappeared was probably about a minute.

At this point, everyone had a sort of bemused expression and there was surprisingly little talking. I remarked that whatever that was, it was perfectly silent, and everyone agreed. We all went back in the house, and resumed our holiday as though it had never happened, which in itself is rather remarkable. A few months later my father and I were talking about something that reminded me of this UFO sighting and I mentioned it to him. He did not remember it. As he was 80 years old, I put that down to an effect of age, but later I mentioned it to my 26 year old daughter who was also a witness to it, and her memory of it was also very vague. I seem to be the only one of us who has a clear memory of this sighting. That seems to me to be one of two significant aspects of this, the other being the fact that these lights were far off and utterly stationary until the precise moment I realized there was something unusual about them.