Did you know there's actually an Arizona ufo site? Unfortunately, it's pretty dead - no sightings listed since 2002.

Anyway, UFOs and deserts: Because it's military experimental stuff, and if they crash, there's less chance of it being in a populated area? Or just better visibility, so they are more obvious?

kewl!

Woah. The descriptions on that site are pretty damn close. Thanks, taz. I feel a little less like I need to question my sanity.

No lights on my last smoke break.

Yeah, I've thought about the military / experimental aircraft thing. A lot.

I even hit up the topographic maps, satellite imagery, following the line of sight out past the border of mexico and going over it quite carefully, spreading an arc of about ten to fifteen degrees along the line. I even got a GPS/WAAS-enhanced bearing on the area I saw them in and triangulated it across 3 well known landmarks, so I knew I was "sighting" in the right direction across the topo quads which I cross-examined with the satellite imagery. There's nothing out that way but a nearby town (whose streetlight-glow I can clearly see) and a strip mine about 250+ miles out. The strip mine would be well below my line of sight, as the earth curves, as would the small mountains that surrounded it. Satellite imagery didn't reveal anything unusual, no blackout areas, no major airfields or anything. That doesn't mean that sort of thing might not be there, but I digress. (Also, some of these orange-light sighting go back to the 70s, it seems. That's a long ways back in black-budget ops and secrecy. If this is the case, I'd argue we've got more to worry about than aliens.)

Mine didn't move around at all, and it's hard to discern any sort of pattern or formation from one or two lights, but the three I saw tonight were in a nearly horizontal line, with the center one perhaps a bit higher than the flanking two.

The general direction being described on the site matches mine, but I'm 80+ miles due west from the site-owner's description, and 120+ miles due west from the guest comment writer's location. There's some pretty decent mountain ranges in between, as well.

The most accurate thing of all about the description on that site is the description of the color, and the sort of indescribable twinkling. I can only say that my intuition and experience tells me it's not just atmospheric distortion making them twinkle. I can say with a great deal of certainty that the source of the light itself is modulating

The weird thing - and I've tried to describe this on the previous UFO post and on the MeFi posts I made - is that I'm usually the first to come up with at least a plausible explaination for "weird looking stuff".

Scintillation, specularity, diffraction/refraction, diffusion, whatever. I'm a fan of light, and a fan of optical illusions. I'm totally fascinated with the stuff. I used to do laser shows professionally, I've done sandbox holography, I make optical art for fun and profit, I'm a fine film and digital photographer and I have a damn fine grasp of the mechanics of sight and light, and how they interact.

There's nothing about this that I can think of that would readily explain what it is I've been seeing. I'm not at all saying that such a logical explaination doesn't exist. But if it does, I have no fuckin' idea what it is.

Here's a reader's comment from that site. Most of that matches what I saw, but most telling is the comparitive description of the lights and a jetliner. Before I read that, I too thought it might be a passenger jet with it's landing lights on, so far off in the distance that it was turning orange. But they're too bright, and too orange, and they'd have to be at 30,000 feet over, say, Mexico, to be that. And if was simply airliners at a distance, why wouldn't I be seeing them all over the place, especially in the easily found flight paths that can be traced all over the Phoenix, AZ sky?

And then there's this graphical description or simulation of the lights. The color is right, as is the modulation - though this guy describes a great deal more structure than I've seen. I haven't been able to discern any patterns, and I'm a near-autistic-spectrum intuitive wizard when it comes to pattern recognition - or identifying a lack of a pattern. (Fibonacci strings, primes, fractals and other examples equal instant pattern-recognition "hits". Pseudo-noise, the digits of Pi and the like equal instant non-obviously-patterned "hits". What I saw falls easily into the noise or pseudo-noise catagory, as far as the modulation of the light is concerned.)

Finally, why do I get the odd intuition that I'll never see these things if I actually bring my cameras outside with me? Every ounce of logic is screaming at me that these aren't any sort of signs of "intelligence", but every ounce of intuition is screaming "Holy shit! They can see you and they know when you have a camera or not!"

Damn, I was supposed to be asleep like two hours ago. One more smoke and another chapter of Arthur C. Clarke's "Tales from the White Hart". Ironically the last chapter - read during the last ball-of-light-free smoke break - was a tirade against UFO nuts descending on his pub.

Oddly enough.

Well, I can hardly wait to see what happens tonight.

On the other hand, we haven't heard from loquacious for some hours now, and I'm beginning to worry that he's undergoing the anal probe as we speak.

Starts making tinfoil pants.

"I didn't ASK for the anal probe...."

I'm sitting here, giggling nervously, and the cats are looking at me intently. Do you think they're in on it?

I'm sitting here, giggling nervously, and the cats are looking at me intently. Do you think they're in on it?
posted by deborah 15 June | 12:53

No, they're not in on it, deborah, they're just waiting for you to leave the room so they can go back to drilling for oil.

I'm alive, well, and currently unprobed. :)

Yeah, I'm interested to see what happens tonight as well. Probably nothing. I just wish I could get a decent pic of them or at least show them to somebody before they kept vanishing.

Oh, and thanks for the AskMe link, Tarrama.

Down on the Texas border, they use the Aerostat to search for border-crossers and drug-runners. Imagine they do in Arizona too.

Can only find daytime pics, but having seen it, I can tell you that it would freak you out if you didn't know what it was.

On preview: Preview timing out. Oh noes!

Nah, I know what an Aerostat is.

And unless they were lighting it up with some kind of freaky looking, unusually bright orange-red light and the airship's surface was covered in mylar or something, that's not what these were.

These things are frickin' bright. Like if someone was trying to dazzle you with a very steadily-pointed bright laser pointer from a large distance or something. (But they don't exhibit any of the qualities of laser light, other than the comparison of brightness.)

Unforunately the best description other than my own I've seen so far comes from that arizonaufo.com site, which isn't really the most reputable or verifiable source.

Hmmm...

Tell me about your childhood?

You really need a companion to do some sky watching with you loquacious even if it's just to have someone to share the experience with.

It's funny the different reactions people have, one of my friends was very excited, I was gobsmacked and my other friend just wanted to get in the car and leave as fast as possible!

i'm glad i had someone with me when i saw mine.
i missed this ufo thing before but someday i may even tell one of "my true life" stories--

I've generally been somewhere between excited, gobsmacked, and terrified.

No lights so far tonight, but last time I went for a smoke I brought my camera. I think I got a couple of pretty good long exposures of the half moon through wispy clouds, though.

I think this smoke I'll leave it inside. Not that it's a scientific experiment or anything, but every time I've tried to involve a witness or camera it seems like it vanishes. It certainly hasn't been there any of the times that I've willfully brought out the camera.

I just saw this UFO sighting video on Ifilm. Looks weird.

Holy. Crap.

If I saw something like that instead of my piddling little lights I'd be really freaked out. Those things are pulsating like the ones I saw, but I certainly didn't see any formation flying like that.

No lights last night.