2010-07-13 - Kennewick, WA - Other

VERY large aircraft flying low, slow, and silently.

I walked about 20 yards from my semi-rural house to turn on the irrigation to my windbreak trees for the night. After throwing the valve, I looked up at the night sky and saw an amazing array of lights moving from the southwest to the northeast over our neighbor’s alfalfa field, approximately 400 yds away and only 100 to 200 feet off the ground.

Four things struck me at once: this thing was HUGE, slow, low and absolutely silent.

I saw six white lights in a straight horizontal line, plus there was one blinking, smaller red light above the far-right light. At my relatively close range, I estimated the thing at two to three football fields wide. I’ve never seen anything flying remotely as big as this, in my life, or heard of any plane so large. The whole array was moving very slowly, maybe 15-30 mph. I had the feeling I was looking at the trailing edge of a huge wing, or perhaps the edge of a disc.

It moved slowly along its trajectory, headed towards town, where there is an airport.

I thought: "If this is a plane coming in to land, it’s gigantic, must be some secret government job, but why is it silent and illegally (and dangerously) low?"

As it moved along, the bulk of my barn blocked it out, so I walked rapidly to the other side of the barn, towards town, and there it was again, following its course, and I watched it disappear over the hill, with no change in the light array.

Very quiet, very low, very slow, VERY large.

The next day I told my brother about it, and he told his son, who happened to see the same thing, with eight witnesses, 15 minutes after I did. My nephew only saw four white lights in horizontal array, and guessed it was two craft flying in formation, but like me, wondered why they were so low, so slow, and dead silent. He said they seemed to meet up with another, smaller, moving, bluish-colored light, and then turned from their course and moved towards the southeast and that when they did, super-bright lights flashed for an instant, like a prism turning, and then they moved slowly out of sight.

I hold ((deleted)) degrees in ((deleted--arts and sciences)), including ((deleted--multiple degrees)) from the University of ((deleted)), and a ((deleted--advanced degree from prestigious overseas university)). I have never seen anything like this in my life; it took me aback for an instant, but then I rapidly started to catalog and process what I was seeing. I have an open mind towards unusual phenomena, and believe that the unexplained represents a major frontier for science.

For what it’s worth, I live within 10 miles of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, now undergoing cleanup, where eight or nine deactivated plutonium production reactors, and one live power-generating reactor, sit in a row along the Columbia River.

On another front, the first crop circle in the USA occurred within 5 miles of my house, and very near the flight path of whatever it was I saw.