2012-08-10 - Seattle, WA - Fireball

Lone Fireball flew over my apartment, zig-zagged, changed colors, flew off(?)

For the second time now since July 7th, I have had another sighting of one of these things. Last time I saw upwards of a dozen of these things fly over a grocery store. Last night/early this AM my girlfriend and I were standing on our balcony at 2am, gazing up at the night sky. We'd seen a shooting star (no question in my mind) moments before this and a jet was creeping by off in the distance (no doubt again - could hear it and familiar with the light patterns on airliners). Then, we saw one of these fireballs. I saw it first and gasped. Pointed up at the sky, said "HONEY LOOK HOLY S* THAT'S ONE OF THE THINGS I SAW!" She watched it as I ran inside to grab something with a camera on it. It had come from behind us, flying over the top of our building at what appeared to be a relatively low altitude. I started to capture video the best I could on my iPod touch...which isn't much obviously. Not a great video but I wanted to document it SOMEHOW for my! self mainly.

Here's the strange thing....before I had a very difficult time describing just how odd this thing looked. This time I paid attention to every detail knowing that is what NUFORC needs. Luckily, on this occasion the thing made very erratic movements after coming in a north to south direction over our apartment complex.

It did a sort of subtle zig-zag movement a few times, then glided into a change of direction to the left (East) in a motion that can only be described as perfectly organic. Ballerina like, very graceful and smooth. At times it seemed to produce a bit of a red trail. It did change color dramatically unlike the last ones I saw. This time it started out BRIGHT yellow, almost white, faded to a blood red, then back to near white again. No real pattern to the changes that I could discern. Luckily my crappy video does at least show evidence of this to some degree, though not to the same degree as to the naked eye.

OK here's the really strange thing... It had this..vibration to it. I don't mean that in some spiritual way or metaphysical pseudo-scientific sense....Imagine the way a guitar string looks when it's plucked.

Sitting motionless, you can see a guitar string perfectly without interference or distortion. Now if you *pluck* a guitar string, causing it to vibrate and produce sound, you can still see it. It still maintains it's same general shape (a metallic line in the string's case) but it is moving so rapidly that it appears distorted. It gets blurry, sort of elongated at times, or wider at others, but in the center where it normally rests you can still see a basic ghost of it's shape and details.... It's definitely there, but your eyes can't keep up with it. That's what this thing appeared like. It was definitely round, but there was this weird fuzziness to it that was not caused by distance or lack of efficient eyesight. There was some kind of....other wordly or at least odd and very rapid motion to this thing....that's what I mean when I say it was "vibrating".

Anyway, it went left, going behind a tree, where I could still see it a bit with my naked eyes. It sat there for a good minute at least, and eventually just was not there when I looked up again.

Definitely not a chinese lantern. I actually had set one off into the night after the experience I had on the 7th of July just to try to see if it in fact was what I had seen. I can unequivocally state it was not a chinese lantern. I at some point felt electric, the way you do before a lightning storm.

I checked the weather report for today on the NOAA site, and at that time it looks like the wind was blowing in a Northern direction at about 5mph, max of 8.....but north is the exact opposite direction this thing was going.

I may upload the video but am hesitant to. It is not good quality, and on top of that I am audibly shaken up by what I'm seeing and sound like a scared little girl or something so it's kind of embarrassing.

ALTHOUGH.....I am a video professional by trade so in an attempt to clean up the crap video a bit and enhance it to get a better look at this thing..... I found something positively EERIE. Right before I stopped taping, something that appears to be a "gray alien" face takes over the left side of the frame. Note this only happens when I process the video to increase contrast and boost GAIN levels, which can cause distortion if done inappropriately. In my opinion I don't think if grays exist, they have anything to do with fireballs or really care to associate with us, but it is definitely maybe worth noting.