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Witness image. (Credit: MUFON)

Virginia witness photographs UFO hovering over neighbor’s tree

A Virginia witness at Richmond reported watching and photographing a “small, glowing, rod-shaped UFO hovering silently in a neighbor’s tree,” according to testimony in Case 61042 from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

The witness was outside walking when the object was first noticed about 11:33 p.m. on August 24, 2014.

“I was prompted to notice a small, glowing, weird rod-shaped object hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground in the flimsy, leafy, outer branches of a large tree behind a house in my tranquil, heavily-wooded suburban neighborhood of Stratford Hills in Richmond, Virginia,” the witness stated.

The area is part of the witnesses’ regular walking route.

Witness image. (Credit: MUFON)

Witness image. (Credit: MUFON)

“I’m 54 years old and I’ve been walking this route nearly every day for 10 years and what I beheld at 11:33 p.m. on a very quiet Sunday night was abnormal and totally out-of-place! Most of my neighbors probably were in bed.”

Something odd caught the witnesses’ attention.

“I was fortunate to view the mysterious glowing object that seemed to be hiding up in the tree and I partially attribute my good fortune to the fact that it was a new moon – the darkest night of the month!”

The witness described the object.

“The silent UFO first was rod-shaped with a glowing blue light on the left end and a pinkish-violet light on the right end. It was hovering horizontally in a place where a human could not be. It was not a new-fangled bug zapper and there are no cable-TV or electric lines running near the tree and definitely not at that height. No logic for the uncanny faintly-glowing lights in the tree.”

The witness used an iPhone 4S with no zoom to shoot video of the object and then switched to shooting still images in order to zoom in. Thirty images were shot over a 10-minute period.

“During this time the small, anomalous, cylindrical UFO/entity morphed into an orb which sometimes appeared cobalt-blue and other times violet with a freaky purplish core. Then it morphed back into a rod that was more white-colored and appeared to be segmented, reminiscent of a bacterial rod under a microscope.”

Upon reviewing the images, the witness cannot identify the object and was later intrigued that the object appeared to emit a sound.

The witness uploaded five still images with the report, which was filed on October 29, 2014: Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4 and Image 5.

“This flying object ain’t one of ours – NOT a drone, stealth bomber, planet Venus, or swamp gas. I did not hear any sounds coming from the object that night but later when I downloaded the video I was surprised to discover that my iPhone had picked up some intriguing clicking noises and when I showed the video to my neighbor S– she said, ‘It sounds like Morse code.’”

The witness decided not to share what he saw with the neighbor, but did notice that after that night they began leaving a porch light on.

“I did, however, tell one of their male neighbors and B—– agreed with me that maybe his neighbors who live in the house in question saw the object too and it spooked them?”

The witness is still out walking in the same area at night and has not noticed the object again – but did discover other nearby sightings were reported.

“My sighting in Richmond was at 11:33 p.m. on August 24, 2014, and just four hours later at 3:30 a.m. on August 25, 2014, a motorist on I-295 N near the Hopewell exit, which is only 22 miles south of Richmond, was followed up the road by a bright UFO orb that was moving a lot faster than manmade highway traffic. Then the orb targeted another car in the southbound lanes and when the sphere made contact with the other vehicle both the orb and car vanished into thin air! Then the driver of the first car saw the orb reappear, and when it started following their car up the highway again they became ‘terrified,’ put the pedal to the metal, and made a hasty retreat off the next exit in sight. I learned of this at the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). 2.”

Witness image. (Credit: MUFON)

Witness image. (Credit: MUFON)

The NUFORC report can be seen here.

The witness also noticed a second nearby event.

“Then a few hours later around 9 a.m. on August 25, 2014 a seasoned colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve was killed when his F-15 fighter jet crashed under “mysterious circumstances” in the Blue Ridge Mountains west of Richmond near Deerfield, VA. Coincidentally enough, this was in an area where lots of residents have reported UFOs in the sky and orbs near the ground. They say it took two days to recover the colonel’s body and the official Air Force story was that he was from Massachusetts on a “routine training mission.””

An early story about that crash appears here.

The witness also discovered that a Canadian couple had a similar encounter to his just four days earlier and they posted a YouTube video.

“I’m not going to speculate or draw conclusions, but it seems like an awful lot of weirdness for such a small region in ten hours! Last but not least, a couple of weeks after my ‘close encounter’ in Richmond, Virginia, USA, I was prompted to discover a seemingly-credible YouTube video of a small, blue-pinkish-violet, rod-shaped UFO that a man and woman in Ontario Canada videoed while sitting around a campground fire pit and the anomalous silent hovering object looks uncannily similar to the UFO that I photographed in Richmond, VA, when it was in ‘rod mode.’ The Ontario sighting was on August 20, 2014, only four days before my sighting in Virginia, and the Canadian couple was prompted to upload their video to YouTube on August 24 which synchronistically was the same day as my sighting!”

The YouTube video can be seen here.

Virginia MUFON is investigating. Please keep in mind that most UFO sightings can be explained as something natural or man-made. Virginia has a current UFO Alert Rating of 5 with a low number of recent reports nationally. Virginia had 5 UFO reports that occurred during September 2014 – calculated at .61 sightings per million population.

The UFO Alert Rating System is based on five levels – 1 through 5 – where states with 4.01 or higher reports per million residents are rated an Alert 1; 3.01 – 4.0 reports are an Alert 2; 2.51 – 3.0 are an Alert 3; 2.01 – 2.5 are an Alert 4; and those states with 2.0 or lower are rated an Alert 5.

The above quotes were edited for clarity. Please report UFO activity to MUFON.com.

About Roger Marsh

Roger Marsh is a UFO writer and content developer. He is Director of Communications for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) where he manages media contact, rights and permissions, and content development for television, film, documentary, radio, print and stage. Roger is a MUFON case researcher for History channel’s “Hangar 1: The UFO Files.” He is editor of the monthly international MUFON UFO Journal, executive producer of the weekly “MUFON UFO Traffic Report” radio show; serves as the MUFON webmaster; reporter for the daily “UFO Traffic Report” in web and audio formats; and publisher of the “MUFON Books” imprint. He is the author of Sacred Dialogue, editor of Silent Invasion, and co-editor of Ron Paul Speaks. Roger was featured in the 2015 season premiere episode of Destination America's "Monsters & Mysteries in America." Roger and his wife, Joyce, live in Scottdale, Pennsylvania, restoring a 1910 Pennsylvania four-square.

8 comments

  1. ” Please keep in mind that most UFO sightings can be explained as something natural or man-made.”

    No duh, but the lady clearly knows what’s normal and what is not. Who’s to say what it actually is, but this morphing object clearly isn’t man-made. Geez.

  2. This is an excellent post.

    My daughter and I just attended our twenty-something airshow in Fort Worth, Texas.
    I state this to show that I am very familiar with ‘things that fly.’

    At 11 pm on June 13, I watched a lighted craft over Dallas for three minutes.
    It hovered, circled and then dove at a terrific speed.

    My UFO was not human-manufactured nor controlled.
    There definitely is an intelligent, non-human presence in our environment.

    Let us dispense with the debunking junk and get on with solving this enigma.

  3. PLAINLY a sighting of Venus…

  4. Nothing more than a quadcopter with GoPro4. Probably spying in the neighbor’s bedroom or bath looking for naked women. That or some swamp gas.

  5. Hey Billy, how familiar are you with drones?

  6. Sheila, familiar enough to know that all UFOs are them.

  7. Here in Virginia we investigated this sighting. It was a visiting family’s child’s drone caught in a tree for 3 days, then it fell out. Case closed.

  8. Hi, your sighting looks just like mine! I just posted my report, case number 63197. I am located in Wilmington NC.

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