2017-10-25 - Black Creek, NC - Diamond

A series of bright firework-like lights apparently exploded and backlit a large object

I witnessed something strange at 1:55 AM Eastern time on Wednesday, October 25, 2017 in Black Creek, North Carolina, my hometown. In the eastern/northeastern sky as I was just about a mile northwest of town driving into it on US Highway 117, I saw two bright white flashes out of the corner of my eye. It looked almost like a strobe from a cell phone tower, but there isn’t a tower near where I saw this. And unfortunately, I only saw this in my peripheral vision, but I could tell it came from my left, from the east. It was too bright to be a cell tower anyhow; it immediately grabbed my attention.

I kept staring off to the east while trying to keep my eyes on the road at the same time. I got a good look at what happened next. This was in a slightly different area of the sky; the strobe lights looked maybe a little north of east, but this was due east. It looked like a firework, the white ball type that explode into orange sparks and aren’t really pretty but just make a lot of noise. I saw one just above the treeline, but I could tell it was distant, not coming from town, which I was approaching. There was no sound and my window was partway down; the radio was on Coast To Coast but it wasn’t too loud. A firework surely would have made sound and this was a ways away. It was just barely above the treeline, sort of like seeing lightning in a thunderhead miles away. There were no storms on the radar and not a cloud in the sky, though, nor did this look like any kind of storm. My thought was that if this were a firework, I shouldn’t have been able to see it for as ! far away as I appeared to be from it. Also, as I stated, it was in a different part of the sky from the first flashes.

The oddest part of what I saw was that the sparks that were left upon the disappearance of the white ball seemed to form some type of ring, not a solid cloud of orange sparks. There was some type of object obscuring the cloud of sparks leaving the outer fringes visible. The obstruction looked like a thunderhead, but far too low in the sky. It was shaped kind of like the crown of a diamond, again just barely above the trees. It disappeared rapidly when the sparks faded, and my town was quiet when I came home, and I saw nothing else amiss.

I have never seen anything like it in my life and was never really a deep believer in UFOs. I really want to learn if anyone else saw this late Tuesday night/very early Wednesday morning, or has ever seen anything like this before. The best description would be those ugly loud fireworks, but so much of it doesn’t make sense. It was quiet and too far away, so what I saw had to be good-sized. And who really shoots off fireworks at two in the morning? In my small town, that will draw out the cops! Seymour Johnson Air Force Base is about twenty miles south of me; was this some kind of elaborate war game or something? I just know it scared me a bit. It sounds atypical of reports I’ve heard Mr. Davenport read on-air (I listen often but not always, as much as I can). I just really want to know if anyone else has ever seen this, or this particular thing I saw.