Yesterday was the Fourth of July and I celebrated it by sitting in a parking lot in northern Indiana. I would rather have been someplace else but I was stuck there so I decided to make the most of it by checking out the local firework displays.
Apparently folks in the Hoosier state take their Independence Day celebrations seriously. No sooner had the sun scarcely cast its rays above the early morning horizon than the fireworks began detonating. I suppose that's about how long it took for the alcohol to start taking effect since the locals had probably started drinking early in anticipation of the holiday. Having worked late the night before I was rudely awakened to the sounds of crackles and booms.
The fireworks continued being launched at intermittent intervals throughout the day. Usually there would be a flash of light and a puff of smoke, followed several seconds later by a loud boom! That was if they were some distance away from me. The ones that were closer I usually heard before I saw. Some were really close since there was a fireworks stand just a couple hundred feet away from me. Those were the ones that made me sit up and take notice. The sound was practically deafening.
When darkness finally came the sky really lit up with a spectacular display of colored flashes and sparkling lights. They seemed to be shooting off from several different places at the same time. Rainbow colored lights were filling the horizon. As I was sitting there peacefully watching the festivities something interesting happened...I saw an IFO! I know, it would have been much more exciting if it had been a UFO, but thanks to Steve's IFO series I was able to identify it pretty easily so it was just an IFO. Actually there were several of them.
The first was a bright flash of white light that zipped past a streetlight. It was only there for a second and then it was gone. A few seconds later it flashed by again in the opposite direction and I quickly recognized what it was--a big moth flying past the street light. That one wasn't too hard to figure out.
The second one was also a flash of light, this time neon yellow and very close to me. It continued to flash off and on as it zig-zagged back and forth around me. This one was also very obvious--a firefly. I used to see them all the time back when I was a little dude in Texas so they are pretty familiar to me. Nothing worth getting overly excited over.
Then something happened that was worth getting excited about...or at least so thought a crowd of people that started enthusiastically gesturing towards something off in the distance. A bright orange orb of light was rising up at an angle from the ground...followed by another...and another. Soon there was a long string of bright orange lights making their way up into the heavens, one after the other. There must have been twenty of them in all, floating through the sky and forming tiny little little geometric shapes. Triangles were very common.
The people in the little crowd obviously had no idea what they were looking at and a flurry of guesses soon filled the air. Airplanes, military aircraft...UFOs...
Soon people started pulling out cameras and snapping pictures and that was when I decided to intervene. The things they were looking at were obviously Sky Lanterns, or Chinese lanterns. I deduced that from the color they were and the way they looked with their flickering orange glow. The fact that they were drifting with the wind also helped me form a conclusion. Plus I had seen photos of them in Steve's IFO thread. I had never seen any in real life until that moment but they are pretty easy to recognize...at least for a UFO investigator. The people in the crowd probably would not have had a clue if I had not told them.
After I had dazzled the crowd with my brilliant explanation I wandered off chuckling to myself and wondering how many reports MUFON and NUFORC were going to get about orange-colored UFOs over norther Indiana. Checking the lists this morning I was not disappointed. There were several of them, not just from the Midwest but all over the country, and all describing basically the same thing.
For the past two years the Fourth of July holidays have been marked by an increase in UFO reports of colored fireballs. It seems that this year was no exception. I think we can at least be fairly certain that a number of those reported holiday UFOs are actually IFOs. Maybe not all of them, but a large percentage. I'm sure they will be back next year too. So will the people who point excitedly into the sky and snap blurry photos with trembling hands as they think they are witnessing something extraordinary. I won't be arguing with them either...the firework displays were out of this world!
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