2014-06-03 - Kannapolis, NC - Sphere

Had made a fire for me and a few friends to sit around late in the evening in the backyard. While getting fire started, I was along outside.

After the fire got going, I sat down to relax. After about ten minutes, I had the strangest sensation that someone was looking at me. I looked to my right and I saw this orb which was white in color, the same color as a star. I would say their size was about the size of a softball, maybe as big as a basketball. Hard to tell. However, this orb wasn't a celestial body as it was maybe only 100 feet above my trees running down the property line.

The object was static for approx. 30 seconds as I initially observed it. While looking at it, I was trying to figure out what it could have been. Then after half a minute, the object started pulsing (bright, gone, bright, gone) and began moving erratically over my property, changing altitude, direction, and velocity. It emitted no sound at all that was perceivable to me.

At this point, I ran in the house and got my friends to come outside and observe. We could not identify the phenomenon, however, one friend offered up that they could be fireflies. This was the closest explanation, however it failed to explain the color (object(s) were bright white, not greenish-yellow), nor the speed at which they were able to traverse the sky (very quickly as to meandering around).

We then began seeing other orbs spontaneously appearing in the night sky, and they began to fly in formation. The maneuvers would then break off in different directions and start kind of behaving randomly again. An orb would appear in a place in the sky, disappear, then pop up in another location.

The pulsing of the light was not static either. Sometimes they would strobe faster, other times they would appear to flicker.

We tried to photograph them, but they did not appear in the digital photographs, which was odd because they were much more luminous than the regular celestial objects appearing in the night sky. In total there were four of us obs! erving.

I was also using binoculars to see them upclose, however, I was unable to make out any shape or physical form as the light they emitted was intense and not translucent. At one point, I believe I heard a helicopter nearby, and wondered if they were seeing this. There was also a jet aircraft moving quite fast and flying low which came out of nowhere and was traveling in the direction that the orbs were present.

Several of them shot up vertically to the flight's altitude and got very close to the aircraft. Immediately proceeding this event, the sky seemed to be brimming with these objects flying in formation in groups of two's or three's, disappearing, and then emerging way across the sky in the same flight path in another location. It seemed to me that they were "jumping" almost. Very weird.

When the phenomena had stopped for about an hour, I was outside and had this thought to myself that was something like, "Wow, I wish I could see them one more time, it was so cool" and immediately, as if on cue, one was literally at the tree tops in my back yard right above my head. The object seemed to persist until I finally called it a night and went back inside.

No further sightings since.

My friend said that the color at times appeared slightly orangish, but I can say that I definitely did not see any orange, or any other color, except pure white.