Had a very interesting day while I was over at a friends house in Modesto, California. We had just finished doing yard work in the backyard, and my friend had to run some errands and asked me to stick around for dinner. It would be more than a few hours before I needed to head up to the Sierra foothills for a meeting with an associate and so decided to stick around.

While I was enjoying the beautiful California day I noticed these little 'sparkles' or 'bright sprites' showing up in the eastern direction. I thought that there were too many of these to be an isolated aircraft as they appeared to jump from one area to another by random and wide distance margins. Since I travel no where without at least one camera, I ran to the car to grab it.

Within a short time I had my 6 megapixel Fuji digital SLR set up and started taking pictures in the general area where I kept seeing these bright reflections or flashes. I had finished taking about 800 shots and decided to transfer and load them into my laptop for a closer inspection, hoping that perhaps I got lucky and caught one of these 'things'. Of course there were your normal bugs and birds and other known airborne particulates that got captured too. But there were three or four shots that definitely didn't seem to fall into any of the above known categories. I pulled up a small program that allows you to zoom in on photos that brings out greater detail and I was surprised at what I saw. Staring in my face was what appeared to be a semi-shiny spheroid (or orb) shaped object.

I was feeling pretty good about my 'captures' and went back outside to retrieve my camera and tripod, (this was about an hour later). I had just grabbed the tripod and started to walk back when I noticed a huge reflection in the North by Northwest skies. Well I thought to myself, I'm here with the camera and tripod in my hand so what the hell lets take a few more shots!. I had the camera in burst mode so was able to fire off five shots instantly and then came back inside to see if I'd gotten lucky again.

The very first shot nearly made me fall out of my chair. It seem to have many of the characteristics of a classic disc. I quickly opened up the small photo program to zoom in on the object and was surprised to see what appears to be a cupola on the top of this object. There also appears to be a few of the orb or spheroid shaped objects flying nearby.

I am not saying that I captured anything spectacular as these photos have still not been looked at by my usual contacts that I send these to for further analysis. But my fellow sky watchers that I keep in contact with thought that they were pretty interesting shots and suggested that I post them for you and your readers to take a gander at. So I've included two original shots (albeit they've been cropped to keep the email size down), and then a few preliminary zoomed cropped and slightly filter-enhanced versions.

April 26th, 2006

First shot that includes the orb/spheroid shaped object was captured between 2:00 PM and 2:20 PM. It was shot facing the east at full 12 x zoom with a Fuji S602 digital camera.

No air traffic was observed during the shooting.

Wind was a mild 3-5 mph from the South.

Distance to the object(s) is unknown but is generally considered to be quite a distance from the cameraperson.

Second shot of a discoid type looking craft was captured about 3:20 PM. It was shot facing the North by Northwest at a Full 12 x zoom with the same camera as above.

Again no air traffic was seen or observed.

Wind was still mild and unchanged.

Distance appears to be slightly closer to the cameraperson than that of the spheroid shaped object.

UFORA Member