It is important to note that I am a non-active pilot, meaning I haven't flown in 15 years. However, I have been around aircraft and aviation for most of the first part of my life, and spent my first 5 years of college life towards a BAS in Aviation Science. I realized I did not want to be a glorified bus driver and so switched majors in my senior year, which essentially threw me back to the beginning as the core classes were different. I have not logged any time since 2000.
Our sighting happened on December 8, 2012 from approximately 7:46 to 7:55 pm in Abilene, Texas. My wife and I were going to a friends house for a party and she had already gone outside our rear door to get in the car as I was getting my coat or something... She quickly called me and told me to come look outside at these lights. I came outsides, and saw a group of 8-12 lights passing to our east at an angle height of approximately 40 degrees over our detached garage building in the eastern sky. They were in a rough formation of random design, 2-3 thick with about a length of about 8 that stretched across a quarter of the visible sky at that time. They were equal in speed and fixed in placement, but there was no discernible pattern. The first set of lights were observable for about 40 seconds until passing out of view in the distance to the north. The first thing noticeable, after the obvious of a random group of lights in the sky, was their color. The most common colors were red or white, but there was also green, blue, and orange. They did not appear to change color, and this first group was solid. There movement was odd, in that they appeared "as if on a sheet of glass, gliding or sliding across the sky. Also, these did not appear to fly like a normal aircraft... the movement just seemed odd, like they were not following the curvature of the earth, but instead were traveling in a literal straight line. If I had to guess, they appeared around 10,000ft. (Impossible to say without a site reference), and would have been moving at around 250 kts. if at that altitude. They were utterly silent.... as silent as a star is. the colors were off, in a way that new LED chistmas lights are against the old incandescent lights, but in a much more different way. The colors and intensities were like a different interpretation of what we would call red or blue or white... recognizable, but of a characteristic way that I have not observed before in lighting.
About a minute passed, during which I called a friend who is a police chief in a town north of Abilene, and tried to get him to go outside and see if he could see them. I think he thought I was nuts, but I told him to keep a look out as they should have been passing him an a few minutes to his east. To my knowledge he never observed them, but I think it was more likely due to a lack of effort, as he is best described as a "stick in the mud".
After I had placed the call another group of lights appeared from the south and proceeded across the sky, closer to us in the fact that they were at a great angle of about 50 degrees in height, but appeared to be at the same altitude and speed. Some of these lights seemed to blink, but not in a strobing fashion. Rather they just changed intensity. Some appeared to change color, like blue to green or red to orange and back. Two seemed to disappear and then reappear, as if they shut the light off then turned it back on a few seconds later, but the timing and speed did imply it was the same object with no change is behavior other than the light going out then back on. This group still stayed together, but the lights in this one appeared to move withing the group, IE.. they were not fixed as the first group, but were fluid in relation to each other. It is during this group that I filmed them with my Iphone. This group was larger and probably composed of about 20-25 lights. It passed, but just as it was leaving view, a smaller set of individual lights followed in a random spacing and pattern... Literally like stragglers.... there were about 5 of them. after they left our view the event ended.
Calm quiet very clear night. There was absolutely no sound at any point.
I have seen flights of both airplanes and helicopters in large groups before, and this did not appear to match the flight styles of those kind of craft. It is possible that these were a flight of secret military stealth craft, but the lack of recognizable formation or group flying generally employed in those maneuvers leads me to doubt it was normal. the silent aspect along with the way that they moved makes me feel they were not using any kind of known propulsion, but I assume the military has hush kits good enough and with computer fly by wire control systems it might be possible. Its just the colors that really throw me off... They were weird. Military craft will usually practice maneuvers with night vision equipment and so they do not have visible lights, but these did, and yet they did not have any navigation lights on. So my big question is why the lights? I guess if they wanted to hide in plain sight as a UFO, they could, but the fact that they had no sound already meant that they would be unobserved from the ground if dark, and no beacons meant they were not concerned about other air traffic. It just doesn't seem to make sense to me if the object is to deceive or hide their existence. These things could care less that they were visible. They obviously owned that night sky.
I can post the video I filmed of them, and you can see at least one light as I tried to focus in on it, but its the usual shaky. I think it is better for the audio as you can plainly here from our talking the oddity of it, but we were not really watching our language and there are a few expletives, like "holy s**t" and "what the f**k" in it, so I want a moderator to give the ok before I share that.
Anyway, that's my UFO story... very run of the mill and ordinary as far as those things go.
