2013-06-28 - Plummer, ID - Fireball

Close flyby and possible landing of orange fireball type object!

This event started at approximately 11:35 p.m. on June 28th. My wife and I were lying in bed listening to Coast to Coast, with our drapes open on the large bedroom window that faces north waiting to see if we would be able to discern any aurora’s since there were some forecast from the web site she monitors. One of our cats that is both epileptic and deaf was fussing at the foot of our bed.

She got up to put him on the foot of the bed, and as she came around her side of the bed she was looking out the window and described a very bright orange light coming from the north.

I rolled over on the bed to see as well, and sure enough, it looked to me to be an orange fireball type of object drifting slowly our way from the north no more than approximately 700 to 1,000 feet above our small town, so approximately 45 degrees from where we were since it was so close. We both watched for a few minutes as it drifted toward our position. The screen made it look distorted so I grabbed my robe and went outside.

We keep my wife’s bird watching binoculars on a peg in our firewood awning for weird things like this, and as I grabbed them the object turned 90 degrees and started moving west. As I looked at it through the binoculars, it looked to me like a bright orange spherical object emitting an orange misty halo around itself, which gave the illusion that the misty halo was trailing it almost like you would see with a cometary object.

I pulled the binoculars from my eyes as it neared the ridge from my perspective of the small mountain to our west, and I was amazed to see it start to descend and dim as it entered into the trees on the side of the mountain! I called to my wife to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, and she confirmed from the bedroom window that it had indeed descended into the trees up there!

She came outside then and we pulled up some lawn chairs to wait for it to reappear, but it never did, and there was no way I was going to drive out there to see if anything was there! Besides, it went into the forest maybe a quarter mile up the side of the mountain from where the road would be. We waited for about 45 minutes, and then decided to go back in and go to sleep. It’s the weirdest thing we’ve both witnessed to date, but I did report an orange fireball the 4th of July to NUFORC that everyone at our BBQ witnessed about 3 years ago.

The object was visible and moving slowly in plain view for roughly ten minutes until it faded into the forest. My wife wants to construct a floating lantern to experiment to see if it could have possibly been something like that, but it moved under its own power as there were no discernible winds that night and was extremely bright.

This is my second report of unusual objects in our skies in as many weeks, with my earlier report being a broad daylight event June 15th.

I am a full time non-traditional student and the president and founder of a 501(c)(3) here in Plummer, and my wife is a special education para-professional at our local school district.