This is an edited UFO account sent via email to your Oregon MUFON Assistant State Director, Keith Rowell, in April 2012 by Oregon resident Donna Roland (pseudonym). Donna and I would like to know if you also saw this UFO. Please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you did.
UFO Type: Intensely bright, white light with odd behavior.
Sighting Duration: About 2 minutes.
Date: April 14, 2012.
Time: About 9:00 PM.
Place: Beaverton, Oregon.
Witness: Donna Roland and fiancé Tom (pseudonyms).
Donna's UFO account:
On Saturday, April 14, 2012, around 9 PM, my fiancé Tom and I were wrapping up our monthly date night. We were heading out from the restaurant where we just had dinner. As we came out of the building, we turned and headed back to our car, which was parked to the north of the restaurant. Right away, we both noticed an odd, very bright, white light overhead which soon moved rapidly to the NE of us in the sky. Because we live in the city, the only lights in the sky we are used to seeing are airplanes, helicopters, planets, and sometimes stars and satellites. In fact, this very night, we could see Venus, which was to the west of our location. Along with the odd light, we noticed that there were two planes flying to either side, which made the odd light's intensity stand out immediately.
We live next to a busy airport, so seeing interesting lights in the sky is a normal occurrence for us, but this light was different from anything we were used to seeing, or anything we had seen before. For one thing, it was very bright -- brighter than the headlights of a plane when it’s coming in for a landing. Also, the odd light had a much cooler hue than the lights of a plane. The UFO was intensely bright and seemed to get brighter and swell right after we both noticed it. At first it was still, not moving at all, and we could see the planes flying below it.
Then, all of a sudden, the light we were both fixated on dimmed to about 1/4 of its former brightness and flew away from us. It headed NE at about two to three times the speed of the other aircraft in the area. It almost looked as if it was attached to rails and something was pulling it right out of the sky rather than it flying away!? As soon as I realized what I was seeing, I pulled out my little camera (right about then I was wishing I had invested in a better camera!) and snapped a couple of shots. We both watched it until it disappeared over the horizon.
Donna's Wide Angle Photo of the UFO
Photo Commentary
Donna's three photos of the UFO (only one is shown here) do not show a good close-up image of the UFO they saw. This is true of virtually all UFO photos. We say in the UFO investigation business that UFO photos are worthless without the person and their story backing them up. But that's when it becomes interesting. When you look a little deeper. What investigators look for is evidence within the photo that backs up what the witness says he/she experienced. Donna's photos do that.
The photo above is taken at the widest angle end of the zoom lens on Donna's Canon PowerShot A1100 IS camera. The UFO is on the left and an airplane is on the right. Two blowups of the UFO and plane images are shown as insets within the photo.
The fact that the plane and UFO show up at this wide angle setting indicates that they were both bright and the plane was not far away.
The photos also backup her story of the color of the UFO's light. It was bright white and the image in the photo shows a grayish/whitish color. The plane image on the right is reddish as would be expected from a red wing light.
The unusual intensity is the main thing emphasized in her report and this again is corroborated by her photos. Only the very brightest objects in a night sky show up prominently in photos taken at the usual auto exposure settings on consumer level digital cameras.
Note that we cannot depend on the shapes of the images of the UFO object or airplane being truly representative of their actual shapes because the photo was taken at a very slow speed (1/8 of a second) and the images consist of too few pixels to accurately reflect true shapes. Slow shutter speeds mean possible blurring of images, which we see here.
