Post by unbeliever on Sept 2, 2023 8:41:56 GMT -5
I live in a suburban neighborhood in NC. I've been here about 2 years. Around the corner from my street is a public pool with a little basketball court and next to it is a pretty large field/hill used for public events. I like to go there at night and just sit on one of the benches and smoke a few cigs - it's nice and quiet at night. There's massive airline traffic in the area. I'm not into astronomy but I'm a big sky-watcher. I moved here from the NE mountains, and I used to love going out at night and just watching: it was near a military base, so there were always flares, planes, copters etc., not to mention I had a good view of several satellite hostspots and sometimes even ISS with the naked eye (just a light flash), and of course the stars, moon phases and sometimes I was surprised by a meteor or something. I feel very cooped-up in this neighborhood, so I like to walk around as much as possible. There's a little wooded trail behind the pool/clubhouse I frequent as well, even at night. I've gotten familiar with the air traffic and there appear to be quite a few drone enthusiasts around here as well.
Anyway, I went over there last night, about 5 minutes before full-dark, and saw something out of a friggin' movie. I am still in disbelief. I've never seen anything like this before in my life. I didn't take any pics, I have a crappy phone-camera but honestly, I was so caught off guard I just kept staring at it in disbelief. The whole incident lasted a little under 20 minutes. I can't be the only person who saw all this.
As I was climbing the little hill, I noticed an unusual light formation in the sky. Now, airplane lights can take on odd-looking formations when seen at different angles. One of my favorites is what I presume is a large passenger plane, at a certain angle the lights remind me of the old Star Trek Enterprise! But there was something strange about this formation - I realized that the lights were not blinking and it looked HUGE. I sort of just froze at the top of the hill and watched this thing move extremely slowly toward my position. I'm thinking, "Okay...." Then I notice another light moving toward it from behind. It comes closer and closer until I can see it's a classic flying saucer shape, with the lights strobing around the middle. At this point I'm thinking, "Uh, drone show?" The flying saucer moved alongside the Z-shape for a minute or so and then I noticed other saucers, to my right, I'd say about 5 blocks away (?) from where I was, two or three. I look back (middle) and the Z-shape is GONE and the saucer looks awful close. I look back in the other direction (right) and see several more of these saucers at varying distances just milling around. I counted 5. I then thought to look to my left: there was another! Almost as close as the closest craft, meaning I could make out the individual lights strobing around the middle. Another appeared behind it, also looking to be about 5 blocks away. At this point I got spooked and ducked under the tree-line.
I'm under the tree-line looking back and forth at all these saucers in utter disbelief. They're milling around, moving up and down, or just hovering, making no sound at all. One of the middle-distance saucers to my right turned on its side and floated up and down a few times. I look back to my left just in time to see a HUGE line of white lights banking in my direction and moving directly overhead! It was a ramrod-straight line of about 30 white, round lights, perfectly aligned. This thing went STRAIGHT overhead and parked inside of a cloud. I could still see several lights diffused from inside the cloud and one single light punching through a hole, clear as day - it just sat there.
All this went on for about another 5 minutes. Then one by one all the lights winked out. The light in the cloud was the last to vanish. Incident lasted 15-17 minutes. I could not believe I had just witnessed that. It looked like a scene from "Close Encounters"! I went home and called a couple of friends. Then I went back out and sat on a bench for about 40 minutes but nothing else happened. Went back this morning - I'm not going to try and guess sizes or distances, I really don't know, but going back in daylight gave me the impression that some of the saucers were much closer than they looked at night.
I'm totally spooked and have no idea what I witnessed. Can anyone chime in?
PS: The line of lights did not look like Starlink. Lights were clearly round and perfectly aligned, it banked and turned, and it parked in a cloud.