2014-09-13 - Ignacio, CO - Fireball

Orange-reddish glowing fireball seen in Southern sky.

Our Strange sighting

Event Date and Time: Saturday September 13, 2014, 7:46 p.m.

I was visiting with my cousin on my cell phone just outside my front door on Saturday evening (9-13-14) at 7:46 p.m. when I noticed a single cloud up in the Southern sky. Just off to the left (perhaps the South by South East direction) of the cloud I also noticed what I thought was a helicopter heading directly for our local airport.

We are used to seeing helicopters fly from the direction of Albuquerque to the airport several times a week.

As I looked at this incoming helicopter, I noticed it had a rather large orange-reddish glow to it. It soon came clear to me that this was not an approaching helicopter, as it was not showing the usual outline of the shape of any aircraft at all. The incoming light was nothing more than just that, a large, soft, glowing light. I don’t feel real confident speculating the distance that the light was from me or even guessing the size of the object, it’s hard to estimate as I had nothing to compare it with as far as scale is concerned.

As I proceeded to complete my phone call with my cousin, I immediately ran into the house to grab my video camera. With my camera in hand and on my way out of the house, I told my nine-year old daughter to come outside and take a look at what I was witnessing on this nearly cloudless early evening. I powered up my video camera and began zooming in to get a closer look at the glowing object. I was unable to zoom in on the object, which made me think that it was probably farther away then I had first thought. I continued to look above the viewfinder with my naked eye to check for the object’s presence, it was still there. After numerous cycles of checking the viewfinder and looking at the object with my naked eye, I was convinced that I was not going to capture the object in my zoomed in video.

My daughter continued to ask me what the object was as I just kept the camera rolling with the object in my naked eye’s view. My daughter became frightened and decided to go back into the house. I watched (with video camera rolling and it collecting my verbal frustration of not being able to zoom in on the object) the object growing smaller as if gaining distance between itself and me, the observer. The object soon grew very small, made an upward climb and was soon out of my eye’s natural vision.

As I collected my thoughts about what I had just witnessed, I thought to myself; “What makes this experience different from any other visual of a typical man-made aircraft?” My conclusion and rationale to my self-imposed questioning of this experience made me think of the following: If I summed up the time from the moment I first saw the object to the moment that it was seemingly its closest to me and compared it to the time it took for the object to leave the area and vanish, I would say that there’s no comparison between the two sums. The object was able to vanish in much, much shorter time than it to took to arrive, plain and simple.

My daughter thinks the object was red, I think it was more orange, hence, the orange-reddish description. I am over fifty years of age, I’ve had a long career in the same occupation in public service, I am well respected in my local community, and I consider myself a very rational, logical, and reasonable human being. I know what both my daughter and I witnessed this evening and it (the object) was not normal or typical of any man-made aircraft that I have ever seen. Event Date and Time: Saturday September 13, 2014, 7:46 p.m.