2013-11-09 - Kuparuk Oilfield, AK - Light

Bright light above the clouds shines a beam down which does not reach the ground.

At 17:30 I left work, driving south. The sky was solid overcast, very lightly snowing, and the sun had set at 15:00 local time, on the north Alaska coast. I noticed an odd light shining through the overcast to the south, which caught my attention. I kept watching it as I drove about ¼ mile south to an intersection, where I stopped and saw rays or beams of whitish/bluish light shining down through the overcast, as if a powerful searchlight was suspended above the clouds, shining down. The light beam did not reach the ground.

Only the immediately surrounding clouds were lit, not a diffuse glow. I turned east at the intersection, and saw that the light seemed to stay in the same position. Intrigued, within a few hundred yards I turned off onto a side road, and positioned my truck so I could see the light and area around it clearly, put the vehicle in park and rolled my window down.

I couldn’t hear anything but my truck idling, and it looked like the light was slowly drifting east above the clouds. At this point I remembered to take pictures with my cell phone, with my arms extended out my open window. I took the first picture, and the flash went off, so I turned off the flash and took another picture. By the time I took the second picture, the light had faded almost completely. From when I first noticed the light in the clouds until this point took about 5-7 minutes.

I waited a few more minutes, then drove east for about a mile, where I saw a bright light in the sky to the east, over another well-lit oil facility about 3 miles away. As I looked at this brilliant point of light, which was brighter than Venus on a clear dark night, it faded away, either going through the clouds or having a dense cloud layer obscure it, or by simply going dark.

I checked with our weather observer and found that the cloud layers were at 6,000’ 5/8 overcast, 9,000’ 6/8, and 15,000’ 7/8. My angle to the light was about 30 degrees above the horizon, so I estimate the distance to the object at 12,000’. My feeling at the time of the sighting was a mile to a mile and half distance.


((NUFORC Note: We spoke at length via telephone with the witness, and we found him to be exceptionally sober-minded. We suspect that he is an exceptionally qualified, and reliable, witness. PD))