2012-11-18 - Roswell, GA - Fireball

Reddish Orange fireballs over Roswell Georgia

My sighting started at approximately 9:05pm EST. I was on the back porch of my home looking to the north,north east , away from the moon which was approximately 180 degrees the other direction and below the tree line. This is my largest view of the night sky as i am mostly surrounded by very tall trees. I was sitting facing this direction and noticed 2 bright reddish orange lights emerging over the tree line at 30 degrees off compass north, which is my horizon and the lowest tree line in sight.

The lights appeared about an inch apart from my point of view moving from what appeared to be an East to West bearing. The lights were bright but not as bright as Jupiter which was off to my right which i see regularly and is often the brightest object in the sky other than the moon. The sky was completely clear, and i could see stars on the tree line/ horizon in the background, as well as a few passing/blinking planes in the same approximate area as for comparison. I am very familiar with the air traffic around this area and am very familiar with the the flight paths over this area as it seems to be a relatively high traffic area for planes. However this was nothing like anything i have seen for myself before. The 2 lights we diverging and disappeared in about 10-15 seconds. They seemed to be ascending horizontally rather than any sort of decent, as possibly a flare would have, and were moving at a steady rate. The relation to each other was about 12 o’clock and 5 o! ’clock top to bottom, as if a plane was on an extremely high banking maneuver, although the lights seemed much too far apart and to quickly moving to be one object.

I quickly determined that these lights were not connected because they seemed to be drifting apart from one another while holding their bearing of East to West while moving at their own independent rates of speed. When i stood up out of curiosity and took about 3 steps forward, about 10-15 sec later, 3-4 more of the same objects appeared as the 2 before over the same spot heading in the same direction. My house is situated on a hill and i immediately went up the hill to gain a better perspective and as i did a total of 6-7 lights appeared moving in this similar direction. I grabbed my iPhone and began recording what i could. It was completely dark so i didn't know if they would show up or not, but despite the neighbor’s patio light glaring against the camera i managed to capture s few of the lights. Unfortunately i stopped recording on accident when i starting moving up the stairs to the top of the hill, so when i got to the top i started another recording. Although ! you can make out some of the lights in the video it really does no justice to the sighting as i was filming on a phone at night and had a bad glare. I happen to be a videographer/ video editor and hesitate to post the footage due to its poor quality even though some of the lights are visible in the video it is certainly not a definitive piece of evidence in any way as to what these lights were or really even their bright reddish orange color. Mostly it will serve as documentation to myself that it actually happened.

With in about a minute all of the lights disappeared in front of me, not in any kind of sequence and although they were flying in some sort of formation relative to one another, there was no recognizable pattern. These lights were not blinking but had some sort of vague pulsing regularity that never stopped until they disappeared. There was also no noise whatsoever before the sighting, during or after. I stayed for about 20 min examining the sky for any further explanation but had no further sightings.