Size of Object(s)

1/8 of the moon

Distance to Object(s) & Altitude

200 yards

Shape of Object(s)

spherical light

Color of Object(s):

white

Full Description & Details

On the night of January 2nd 2005, three of us witnessed an unidentified floating light hovering over our field out back in Norfolk Connecticut. The sighting occured between 10:30pm and 11:15pm and we left before it disappeared. The light was white and moved about in the air in random directions--vertically and horizontally, diagonally too. The sighting occurred approximately 200 yards away. The altitude of the light ranged from just above ground to 100 feet in the air. When two of the three of us looked at the object out of the side of their eyes, it appeared to be flashing brightly for an instant. The area is very rural. It occurred over a small field of ten acres and there are few houses in the area, primarily hovering over a copse of pine trees in the middle of the field. Upon noticing the light, we stared at it for a while wondering what it could be. It wasn't a spotlight because we drove our car around to the other side of the field where another house sits and the light looked exactly the same still. We were afraid to venture close to it because we just didn't know what it was and thought it might be dangerous. We've never seen anything like this before and its been our weekend home for over 20 years. We have noticed in other sightings reports that lights such as these have been seen in Torrington recently, as well as in other parts of COnnecticut. It made no sound whatsoever.

We did actually take a great photo of the object. And it will be submitted to this site. It was also enlarged and enhanced. It looks like the moon but it's not. There was no moon that night--you can check it. It was overcast. And there were no stars. The light seemed much smaller than the moon yet larger than a star.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: The Litchfield County Times newspaper published a press article on this sighting. Below is the reprint of this article from February 3, 2005:

"A Norfolk Couple's Mystery: What Was That Ball of Light?"

By: Asa Fitch

Litchfield County Times, February 3, 2005

NORFOLK-At about 10:30 on the evening of Jan. 2, Drew Quale and his wife, Sally, were with a friend at their weekend home on North Colebrook Road, packing up their car for a trip to Bronxville, N.Y., when they say they saw a brightly-lit orb hovering above a 10-acre field nearby.

The object zigzagged over the dark landscape, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, darting "randomly like a hummingbird" from just above the field to 100 feet in the air, according to a report the Quales submitted to www.ufoevidence.org.

For about 45 minutes, Mrs. Quale took pictures of the object with her digital camera, following it from the backyard as it ranged over a copse of pine trees in the middle of the field and behind a crabapple tree on one edge of the field. The Quales were from 200 to 300 yards away from the object. It made no noise.

About 45 minutes later, at about 11:15 p.m., the Quales decided they ought to leave. It was a Sunday, and they had to make it to Bronxville, a town in Westchester County, that night and go to work the next morning. As they were leaving, they drove to the other side of the field and into an ancient driveway, noting that the shape and intensity of the object didn't change. They left while the object was still visible.

"We were afraid to venture close to it because we just didn't know what it was and thought it might be dangerous," the report says. "We've never seen anything like this before, and [this has] been our weekend home for over 20 years."

Mrs. Quale, a public information officer for the Bronxville School District, said the object appeared to be about the size of a basketball. The Smith College graduate said she has explored the possibility that it was ball lightning, a vaguely-understood natural phenomenon in which a ball of electrical energy appears and moves horizontally through the air. She now doubts that was what she saw because it stayed so long, even after the Quales left. It remains a mystery, she said.

"It was like someone had a mouse and was moving a cursor," Mrs. Quale said. "It was like you might move the cursor this way and that way and click on the word you wanted to correct. We thought it was so weird we didn't want to go out there."

Mr. Quale, a Harvard Law School graduate and a senior partner with the Seventh Avenue law firm of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP, was quoted in Norfolk Now, the community newsletter that first reported the story, as saying, "We still have no idea what it was."

Though the object looks like a full moon in pictures, Mrs. Quale said she was certain it was not the moon or any other celestial body. The sky was overcast that night, she said, and everything was black except for the ball of light.

"It was absolutely black, because there was cloud cover and no moon and no stars, and if you looked out at the field with the eye you couldn't see anything but this white light," she said.

A meteorologist at the Western Connecticut State University confirmed that the sky was overcast the night of Jan. 2. Records compiled from a weather station at the Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk show that at 10:31 p.m. the temperature was 35.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity was at 97 percent, which is very high. The wind was calm to mild, and a very light rain fell sporadically between 8:30 and 11 p.m. that day.

Sixty percent of the moon's surface was illuminated on Jan. 2 in Norfolk, but the moon didn't rise that night until 11:31 p.m., 15 minutes after the Quales left, according to data from the U.S. Naval Observatory.

The Quales' strange encounter is certainly not the first of its kind in the region, though the Quales appear to be decidedly more credible than the average UFO spotter.

UFOs of all brands-from hot-dog-shaped ships with blue spotlights emanating from portholes to a small, star-shaped craft hovering above Main Street in Winsted-have been reported in Litchfield County on Web sites like www.nuforc.org and www.ufoevidence.org.

One story described a "mothership" visiting Litchfield center in 1971. Another reported a "bizarre star" that moved quickly across the sky in Washington in 2002.

One recent report bears a striking resemblance to what the Quales say they saw. On Sept. 7 of last year at 8:30 p.m., a 50-year-old quality assurance technician from Torrington reported seeing an orb whisk across the sky from the balcony of his second-story apartment. The man, an "amateur astronomer from a very young age," wrote that he saw a globe moving slowly through the air for some time before darting away quickly and disappearing.

It "appeared to be illuminated from within," according to an account on www.nuforc.org. "At the last before it faded from view, it was very dimly lit and looked like a crystal ball. It looked transparent, like a globe or sphere. From the time it moved quickly till it faded out could have only been a second or two. This quick movement probably covered 10 degrees of sky."

The man reported seeing the object again a week later, on Sept. 12, and then again another week later. The object looped back and forth and then zipped away.

"It was a very unusual zigzag type of pattern," the man wrote in a report on www.ufoevidence.org, where he also posted a diagram of the object's trajectory. "It did this zigzag type pattern about four times before flying off."

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Witness Background

Observers are adults over 60--three of them. All three are professionals: lawyers, teachers and musicians. Graduates of college as well.

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