I had my second UFO sighting in two weeks while visiting Wilmington, North Carolina this past weekend. I once again felt compelled to document this experience as it was very surreal, and also quite beautiful and exciting. Here’s what went down.
My family and I were visiting my sister and her family at their home in Wilmington for a long weekend. The sighting occurred on Sunday night, our last night of the trip. My brother-in-law and I were watching the James Fox documentary, The Phenomenon, together. Everyone else had gone to sleep. We are both very into the UFO space, and had been planning on watching a UFO documentary together at some point during our visit. I was too tired to stay up and watch one the previous nights of the trip, but Sunday night I powered through. Earlier in the day, I had told my brother-in-law the story of the anomalous objects my dad and I had witnessed in Harvard, Massachusetts just two weeks prior. He then also shared with me the only UFO sighting he had experienced in his life, which occurred near his hometown in North Carolina over 25 years ago.
Suffice to say, by the time we fired up The Phenomenon on Sunday night, we were both pretty jazzed to be hanging together and enjoying some classic UFO content. Around 10:30 pm, while roughly halfway through the documentary, we paused the film and my brother-in-law went outside for a smoke. He went out the front door and walked to his driveway, but then realized he forgot to bring a lighter with him. He headed back to the front door to retrieve his lighter, but before he reached the door, something caught his eye. I was relaxing on the couch at the time, probably scrolling through my 𝕏 feed. Suddenly, my brother-in-law burst through the front door. “You have to come out here!” he frantically exclaimed to me.
I could tell right away from the sound of his voice that something remarkable was happening outside. I leapt off of the couch and followed him back out the front door into the front yard. I followed his gaze up at the sky, towards the horizon to the northeast. We then both stood in awe as we observed a bright, orange-colored, spherical object hovering just above the tree line in the distance. This orange orb was mostly stationary, but would move slightly in different directions. It also seemed to change size, sporadically shrinking and growing. After about 30 seconds of us observing this anomalous object, I ran inside to grab my phone. My only regret from my previous UFO sighting was that I did not try to take any pictures or videos. This time, I wanted to capture the experience. In my frantic scurry inside to snatch my phone from the couch, I smashed my foot pretty hard against the bottom corner of the living room coffee table. I grabbed my phone and returned to the front yard. The orb was still hovering just above the trees. I pointed my phone towards the object and pressed record, but unfortunately the flash setting was on, which obscured the picture due to the excessive light. I stopped the video, turned off the flash, and pressed record again, but by this time, the orb had completely dissipated and was no longer visible in the sky.
Sometime after my attempts to record a video, another smaller, white orb appeared in the same general area as the orange one, moved across the sky rapidly, then also dissipated. I only caught a quick glimpse of this one, but my brother-in-law observed it more clearly. We stood there in the front yard for several minutes afterwards, hopped up on adrenaline and excitedly discussing what we just saw. After some time, we migrated back into the living room and discussed the experience some more. My brother-in-law was quite riled up by the sighting. I was more calm, perhaps because of the freshness of my previous sighting two weeks prior. In an odd way, I had also been expecting to have another sighting, and was not surprised at all when it happened. We continued to discuss the orbs, and rack our brains as to what could they could have been. My brother-in-law works as a Geographical Information Systems Engineer. He spends his days maintaining geographic data systems for the local area where he lives. He presumably has a strong handle on satellite imaging and identifying objects in an airspace, but could not come close to explaining what these orbs might have been.
We did not end up finishing The Phenomenon that night. Our sighting experience derailed our viewing, and after discussing it for a while, the hour grew late and I called it a night and went to bed. My body was tired, but my mind was not done mulling things over. I had trouble falling asleep and did not do so until after 2:00 AM. The next night, we caught our flight back home from Wilmington to the T.F. Green Airport in Providence, Rhode Island. We sat in the far back family section of the plane, and I sat in the window seat with my wife and son in the aisle seat next to me. Our son fell asleep in my wife’s lap fairly quickly, and slept throughout the entirety of the flight. As our plane was landing, a toddler on the other side of the aisle across from us began crying and screaming uncontrollably in his mother’s lap. He became hysterical, his cries growing louder and louder as the plane descended towards the runway. This went on for about 15 minutes straight. As we approached the ground, I began to pray for a safe landing. Prayer is something new for me, but I have been enjoying the process of learning how to pray, how to develop my own method and how to get better at it. I continued my prayer, asking — to no one in particular, just a general ask — to please protect my family and have a safe landing. Then, as we were about 30 seconds from wheels on the ground, I felt a sudden urge to look out the window. I pushed my face close and peered out the window and to the left, as far back as my eyes could see to the area behind the plane. There in the sky, I observed a brilliantly luminous orange orb resting on the horizon. It very well could have been the headlights of another plane approaching the same runway from the distance, but it seemed far too large and luminous. I really felt in the moment that I was observing an object similar to the orange orb from the night before with my brother-in-law.