2012-12-07 - Longmont, CO - Fireball

Three dancing, erratically moving sparkling fireballs observed from a short distance

We were driving into the parking lot on the north side of the intersection of Martin and Ken Pratt, we were just behind the DSW Shoes building on our way to a restaurant when I asked my husband to stop the car. I had seen a strange light flashing in the field just behind this parking lot. He did and we watched as 3 golden balls of light with sparkling tails "danced" slowly around each other, no more than 300-500 yards from where we watched, and not very high in the sky, maybe 300 yards. Their trajectory was descending, but not linear. Sometimes they would pause for awhile or move horizontal to the ground. At least one of them sped up about 100 yards off the ground and extinguished just before hitting the field. All of them eventually extinguished about 20-50 yards above the field.

I don't believe in this type of thing. I am a PhD candidate in the social sciences and believe firmly in ruling out the most plausible explanations before jumping to something unlikely. But this is empirical evidence for something that I do not have an explanation for. I can't get the scene out of my mind and it has kept me up all night. We do not live far from the field and in the morning we will go investigate. I feel an irrational coward for not investigating last night, but somehow it felt overwhelmingly wrong to do so.

Oh, and after spending all night looking at the Internet, I can tell you it is not Chinese lanterns. I've seen a video of those and this looked nothing like that. There was no wind to account for the movements, they were sparkling, and they were speeding up, slowing down, and hovering.