2015-01-26 - Ash Fork, AZ - Light

Northern Arizona bright colored moving light.

I was outside at 5:30am MST on January 26th about 50 miles west of Flagstaff, AZ, walking back to my house after closing the ranch gate for my wife after she left for work.

I saw a meteor in the sky and as I followed its motion, I noticed a bright flashing object in the north-northwest sky about where the meteor trail ended.

The object was about 30 degrees above the horizon, brighter than Jupiter which was high in the night sky at the time. The object was flashing quite rapidly but inconsistently, in several different colors, which caught my attention.

I am quite familiar with the night sky here, as the rural area and terrain provide for great viewing that enables views of the Milky Way on clear moonless nights. I also follow the planets, and this was not a planet, as it was too far to the north and not on the ecliptic.

I assumed that the object was an aircraft or a star, but it did not move like an aircraft, and it was too bright to be a star… So I watched it for a few minutes.

At first, it seemed to be stationary, but soon it moved quite rapidly to my right (further to the north) and then back to where it started. Then it moved up and down and returned what seemed to be close to its original location. Between motions, it would return to its original spot and remain motionless for several seconds.

Obviously, I was intrigued.

I lined up the view of the object with a tree in my line of sight so that I had a fixed reference point, as I know that sometimes a sky object can only appear to move. I also looked at the pattern formed by several nearby stars. At this point I confirmed that the object was indeed moving, and moving very fast. It made several circles and figure 8 patterns, and a couple of dramatic zig zags that were very rapid. None of the motions appeared to move the object any closer to my location.

After a total of about 15 minutes, I got a pair of 10 power binoculars, but I couldn’t see any additional details to the shape of the object, but the colors were easier to make out. White, red, blue and green were the object’s predominant colors, with their frequency pretty much in that order.

I don’t know what the object was, but it seems to fit the UFO category to me. I will look for the object in the same location tomorrow, and if it is a star whose light was perturbed, the star should still be there… Considering the motions observed, I don’t think so..