Monday, August 5, 2013

August 3rd UFO in Forest Grove, OR

August is Perseids Meteor Shower month and being fans of this, my wife and I while camping out in our backyard with our kids, niece, and nephew, kept an eye on the night sky. Being August 3rd it wasn't the peak of the event, but pretty close so we occasionally would catch a glimpse of one of the Perseids. Hiding amongst the shooting stars and the non-shooting one were also the occasional satellite and plane. Satellites and planes are always easy to tell apart because satellites have no blinking lights and planes do and may also be accompanied by noise.

We had seen several satellites and planes by the time the event occurred. My wife had asked me if something was a satellite then immediately said "Looks like a beam just came out of it." Promptly I turned around to see what she was talking about. What I saw resembled a high level plane or satellite, and I figured it was the later because there wasn't a normal blinking light of a plane. I followed it visually to the northwest and was about to dismiss the beam my wife saw as nothing but some fluke when suddenly it flared up a brilliant white/blue in color. It was so bright that I almost thought it had turned towards us, but it faded back to the same faintness as before as it continued on the same trajectory it had been on. Once more it repeated the flare up, but not quite as bright (probably because it was slightly farther away) and I began to walk toward the front of my house which faces roughly north, trying to keep a visual on it. As it neared the limit of my view from the front yard it did the flare up once again and then disappeared from my sight. 

There was no noise accompanying the object, it never wavered from it's course, and there was no regular time between the flare ups. Any lingering thought of it being a satellite I've wiped from my mind, and I have no doubt that it was not a plane. Closest thing that I'm able to compare it with is the way I've seen some meteors flare up in video footage, but this was moving way to slow to be one, and had no trail coming off of it. 

Immediately after the sighting I reported it to the Mutual UFO Network or MUFON for short, in the hope that someone else might find our sighting in their database that may have seen what we saw. 

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