Full Description & Details

My brother, fiancee and myself had only been in New Mexico for a couple of hours. We decided to camp out (sleep in car) at one of our usual stomping grounds outside of Carlsbad, headed towards Dark Canyon. It is just an old gravel pit where we do a lot of target shooting and so on.

We sat in the car for a while, trying to get comfortable after a 12 hour drive. We had not been there for very long when the first craft came into view.

It was a pretty large object, and at first glance resembled a helicopter with very bright white spotlights pointing in all directions. It hovered slowly in one area for several minutes. We thought whoever was manning it had surely seen us, and they probably did. It moved slowly towards our position, moving only a few hundred feet in a matter of minutes.

At its closest point, I estimate that it was no farther from us than 200 yards, maximum. We had a pretty good view of it, the only obstruction of sight being the lights on the craft itself. We had the windows down, listening for any sound from the craft. It was silent. It was obviously not any kind of helicopter or conventional airplane.

After a few more minutes of slow movement in front of us, it finally picked up some speed and began flying to the right side of our field of view, over a small hill, and then disappeared. We looked for the lights but found nothing. We assumed that it must have seen us and decided to leave the area with the lights off. It was no more than 150 feet above the ground the entire time it was in view.

We were thrilled to have seen it so well and of course happy to be unharmed, as close as it had come. We talked about it for a few minutes with no more activity until we noticed a group of three small red lights in the distance, at least a mile away and possibly several miles. The lights moved together. It looked as though they were lights on a single craft. After a few minutes of 'normal' movement, the lights began to pull away from each other. I estimate that they had moved at least a half mile or more from each other. Each light began doing different things.

Around this time I remembered that I had brought binoculars and a camera. The camera is an inexpensive HP 318 with a viewing screen to check the pictures after you take them. Unfortunately, these small lights did not show up at all, and sadly we had not thought to try to photograph the first craft which surely was close and bright enough to have provided hard results if photographed.

The red lights would move in the shape of circles, do zig zags through the sky, stop completely, and then do more random movements. All of this was done at incredible speed, certainly not like anything the government has made public. I cannot describe the speed, other than to say what they were doing was astonishing.

After flying around like this, they would meet up again and reform their original shape and move together, only to separate and move individually again in these strange manoeuvres, then join again. This event repeated itself numerous times.

When the objects rejoined, they would move so fast towards each other that you would expect them to collide, but they would come to a dead stop every time, like thay had just hit an invisible wall.

The lights finally moved farther away until we could not see them anymore.

This entire event lasted near an hour.

Of course we stayed awake for a while more expecting (hoping) to witness more. No luck- that was all for the night.

Since that time, I have found one photo online from someone in New Mexico who managed to photograph the red lights. Different place, different time- similar description of events, although the person says that he saw 4 of the red lights, and we only saw 3.

I have spent a lot of time in New Mexico including years of living there. I have seen a lot of similar objects, but these were by far the most impressive and obvious, and the only ones that styed in sight for more than a few seconds or a couple of minutes.

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