2012-07-23 - Berthoud area, CO - Unknown

Two stationary lights, one orange and one blue, were seen emitting an orangish beam connecting them.

While driving North on Highway 287 approaching the Berthoud exit, my wife and I saw two, stationary lights in the sky in the direction of Berthoud, Co. Due to the darkness, we had no reference for distance or size of the two objects. Because of this we can only say that they were in a line from our moving vehicle as we moved from south of the bridge before the Berthoud Exit to the Bridge, it'self. I would guess that the objects were well East of Berthoud as their position in the sky did not change much as we travelled approximately 1 mile before pulling over to observe.

One object was blue, the second was orange and from our perspective were approximately 3 finger's-widths apart. When we first noticed them, both appeared to be stationary.

While watching them, and driving North, I had to split my attention between the road and the objects. I saw the lights first but didn't say anything to my wife as they didn't necessarily seem odd.

Then, sometime between when I looked at the road and back, again, a beam of orange-gold light appeared between the two lights, connecting them.

Immediately, I pointed this out to my wife and we pulled over and stopped less than 200 feet before the bridge before the Berthoud exit.

Since I did not see the initiation of the light beam, I cannot tell from which light it originated and, presumably, would not be able to do so if it was, in fact, a light.

However, it appeared that there was some "dripping" of orangish beam where it was close to the orange light. I would describe this phenomena as being similar to a high-pressure hose spraying a stream of water. As it gets farther away from the nozzle, the stream widens and gravity overcomes the water pressure, causing some of the water to fall away from the stream.

In this case, the "falling" portion of the orange beam did not seem to make it to the ground. Rather, it faded out the farther away from the beam it got.

However, the orange light (not the beam) seemed to grow noticeably brighter as the beam continued. We continued watching for maybe 2-3 minutes and tried to take a photo with our camera-phones, but couldn't get a decent image (low-quality phones. . .we didn't get them to take pictures).

After the 2-3 minutes, the beam disappeared. Upon termination of the beam, the orange light seemed to dim. It's just a guess, but I felt that the orange light was a bit brighter after the beam turned off than it was before the beam started.

As we continued to watch, both lights seemed to "retreat' into themselves, getting smaller and disappearing. This took less than approximately 5-7 seconds. Again, from a personal perspective, neither light seemed to move, just wink out. I say this because neither light seemed to get dimmer, just smaller and smaller until they disappeared. I would presume that any light would get smaller and dim if it were moving directly away from us.