Learn more
Resources for helping identify mysterious objects in the sky:
Mutual UFO Network: mufon.com
National UFO Reporting Center: nuforc.org
NASA’s All Sky Fireball Network: fireballs.ndc.nasa.gov
Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies: aerospace.org/cords
Space Weather: spaceweather.com
American Meteor Society: amsmeteors.org
Cloudbait Observatory in Guffey: cloudbait.com
Longmont Astronomical Society: longmontastro.org
CU’s Sommers-Bausch Observatory: sbo.colorado.edu
CU’s Fiske Planetarium: colorado.edu/fiske
At twilight on Saturday, about 15 glowing paper lanterns were sent into the sky over Longmont as a memorial to two men killed in a DUI-related car crash exactly five years earlier, on Feb. 25, 2012.
But the floating memorial left a handful of people in Longmont perplexed by the sight of mysterious lights, evoking thoughts of spaceships, UFOs and other extraterrestrial activities.
“I thought I was hallucinating or something,” said Joyce Brooks, one of three Longmont residents who told the Times-Call they’d seen the objects.
For the fourth year since the crash, friends and family of Anthony Sandoval-Palma and Jerry Martinez congregated at Ninth Avenue and Hover Street, lighting the reddish-orange lanterns and letting them float up toward the heavens.
“We watch them until we don’t see them anymore,” Mary Moreno, a friend of Palma’s since third grade, said Thursday.
In years past, they’ve lit as many as 30 lanterns on Martinez’s birthday — Feb. 21 — and the day of the crash.
The two 27-year-olds were killed when they car they were riding in rolled on St. Vrain Road near North 75th Street and ejected Sandoval-Palma and Martinez. The car’s driver, Adolph Lopez, pleaded guilty in 2013 to DUI-related vehicular homicide.
At the most recent memorial this past weekend, Moreno said, she joked with Jessica Craft about the first year they sent the paper lanterns aloft. She said, “Remember, when the newspaper thought they were aliens?”
Moreno said the Times-Call questioned readers about it back then. She said she got a laugh out of witnesses expressing the same curiosity this year.
Craft, whose husband was close friends with both men, said they’re planning on lighting lanterns again May 3, on Sandoval-Palma’s birthday, and every year on the anniversary of the crash.
“I think it’s very special that all of us get together,” she said.
Aliens?
A Longmont resident named Sue, who spoke on the condition her last name not be used, was the first to call the Times-Call saying she was surprised not more people had been talking about the lights.
She said she thought the first object she saw on Saturday was a drone — until she saw another one, and then many more, trailing it.
“I am not an alien person, that’s not where my head goes, but the thought that came into my head was, ‘Is this an alien invasion?'” Sue said. “And then I thought no, there has to be a logical explanation.”
It kept her up at night, she said, so she turned to Google for an explanation. Her search of “Six Orange UFO fireball phenomenon 2013” produced a still image of something similar to what she had seen, though the objects moved more in the video.
Brooks called the Times-Call after Sue’s comments were printed in the newspapers’s anonymous TC Line feature, saying she was relieved somebody else had come forward as a witness, otherwise she thought she was “going crazy.”
A third woman, Joyce Todd, who said she is 90 years old, called to say she also saw red and pale yellow lights. She said it’s hard to say how high in the sky they were, but they were visible in the distance from where she lives in the Fox Hill neighborhood.
“They’re from space, there’s no question in my mind,” Todd said.
The lights hung in the air in a cluster at about 11 p.m. Saturday, she said, until they disappeared at about 2:30 a.m. She said she’s positive they weren’t airplanes, and her most recent sighting wasn’t the first. She said she’s seen lights in space all her life, and asserts they’re real.
“I’ve seen so many things like this in my lifetime, it’s just mind boggling,” she said.
Educated guesses
Local astronomy researchers said they did not track anything that would seem exceptional to humans outside the space realm — Venus, fireballs, satellite break-ups or even UFOs — in the air over Longmont that night, meaning the objects to them remained a mystery.
Vern Raben, president of the Longmont Astronomical Society, said the club’s all-sky camera shows nothing at the time the flying objects were reportedly seen.
“I’d guess it’s something localized, closer to the ground, and not astronomical,” he said in an email.
The National UFO Reporting Center, based in Washington state, did not respond to messages, though its database shows somebody reported seeing “orange fireballs, bright, scoping the forest” about 7 p.m. Feb. 21 in Nederland. The list of Colorado reports did not extend past that date.
Leonard David, Boulder-area science journalist and author, said the description reminds him of either a misinterpreted fireball or a spacecraft breakup, such as one he saw about a year ago.
“When I hear multiple things when they’re flying at the same speed, moving, that look like they’re all connected, that’s what some of those satellite breakups look like,” he said.
But according to the American Meteor Society fireball log, two nearby fireballs were inconsistent with the time the objects were reportedly seen in Longmont. And according to the Aerospace rocket body tracker, a reentry of an SL-4 rocket body on Friday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Russia was thousands of miles from Colorado.
Chris Peterson, operator of Cloudbait Observatory in Guffey, said objects in the high atmosphere over Longmont are usually visible from his location, but he tracked nothing that night on his camera.
“Given the time, objects at typical aviation heights might still be reflecting sunlight, giving the described color,” he said. “Less likely, but still possible, would be a group of research balloons, which could be as high as the stratosphere and could reflect sunlight.”
He believes that it was most likely a low-altitude phenomenon, such as aircraft or balloons, and nothing as high as space or descending from orbit.
Peterson’s guesses weren’t far from the truth.
Amelia Arvesen: 303-684-5212, arvesena@times-call.com or twitter.com/ameliaarvesen
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