2014-02-01 - Kent, WA - Sphere

Three circular red objects in triangular formation

On Saturday, February 1st , I went outside on my deck to get my cat inside. It was approximately 7:00PM. There is a wooded area behind our house. I saw three circular red lights in the distance.

They weren’t moving like planes, so I assumed that they were perhaps military helicopters. I estimate that their altitude was perhaps 2,000 feet. The other reason that I thought they were helicopters was that they seemed fairly close together, as opposed to how planes would be. There was cloud cover and the lights were below the clouds.

I didn’t think much of the lights until I noticed that they weren’t moving. They were in a triangular formation with one light at the top, another light below it and to the left and a third light to the right of the second light and a bit below it. I still thought that they must be helicopters at this point and I kept watching because it was unusual to see three of them flying together.

At that point, the uppermost light moved in an unusual way. From my viewpoint, it moved down and then to the left, toward the second light. It remained there for just a couple of seconds and then went to the right and up to it’s original position as the top light in the triangle. This movement was very fast and struck me as being unusual for a helicopter. Both times that it moved, both going down and back up again, it followed what could be described as a reverse ‘L’ shape. For example, it moved down and then moved to the left at a 90 degree angle. After that, it followed the same path in reverse, moving quickly to the right and then moving up at 90 degrees to get to it’s original position.

After seeing that movement, it finally occurred to me that they might not be helicopters. Other than The top light, the other two had not moved for over a minute. I thought that it would be unusual for Three helicopters to maintain position for that long. Also, there were no blinking navigation lights.

Just solid red lights. I listened carefully for any noise of helicopters, but there was none. Three helicopters that close and at that low altitude would have made noise.

I grabbed my iPhone that was nearby and started taking what I intended to be a video, but as it turned out, there are just still photos. I have three photos of the lights and also the trees in the foreground. I went inside to get my girlfriend and have her look. I was inside for perhaps 10 seconds. When we both got out to the deck, only one of the lights remained. After a few seconds, it was no longer visible. My thought was that it went above the cloud cover and could no longer be seen. The other two lights may have done the same thing while I was inside. The photos show three very defined circular red lights.

The defined circular shape was another thing that made me think they might not be helicopters because navigation lights would be blinking and have more of a starburst type effect as opposed to being circular.