2018-01-01 - Albuquerque, NM - Light

Several orange lights moving slowly, which faded out, one by one.

I was standing outside getting ready to ring a bell as is my New Year's tradition when I spotted three glowing red-orange dots. They were low to the NE, rising slowly and steadily up southwards. The top two made a sharp curve west and faded out. By the time the third, flickering slightly, slowly faded from view, 5 or 6 more in a loose constellation followed it in the same direction, disappearing one by one. A very bright one appeared afterwards, taking the same curved route as the first two. It took nearly 10 minutes for the whole spectacle to play out.

I'm not sure of the exact number because once I realized they were not helicopters, I was busy trying to get a picture. Afterwards, I thought they might have been fire balloons -- until I saw the one photo that came out.

Those wild orange swirls are the motions of the orange dots within the second it took to snap the photo. They are NOT the result of camera motion because 1) they are not at all the same, and 2) that bright green squiggle in the lower left is a string of Christmas tree lights across the street, and it's absolutely unblurred and crisp.

I've enhanced color and contrast to make the trails more visible but that's all.

The interesting thing is that my first UFO sighting was also of three glowing orbs and happened exactly two years to the minute on New Years 2016 -- which is why I had the camera ready, though I never expected to see them again.