On July 4, at approximately 9:00 p.m., Tom Sanger videotaped a very odd-looking object in the sky over the Sabino Canyon, northeast of Tucson, Arizona.
Armed with a color night vision camera, Sanger captured a fascinating display of changing lights from the object which stayed motionless in the sky above the Catalina Mountains.
The composite image above (starting at upper left and moving clockwise) shows the different shifting multi-colored lights emanating from the object for several minutes.
"We were in the Sabino Canyon parking lot on the northeast part of Tucson," Sanger told OpenMinds.TV. "Sabino Canyon leads right up into the Catalinas. Beyond the mountains is desert wilderness. I just looked at a map and there are absolutely no cities or towns anywhere in the direction the lights were seen for literally hundreds of miles. No airports or military bases at all."
Here's the video taken by Sanger on July 4:
"There was no sound. Initially, I was at 5X with my camera before I zoomed. Thus, these lights were way, way out but still this side of the clouds since they were far off as well. So, no sound, since these were far off lights," Sanger told OpenMinds.TV.
While the term UFO brings to mind extraterrestrial visitations, such photos regularly turn out to be easily explained away as something else.
"The sky was completely overcast over the Catalina Mtns. The small dots you see on the screen are normal for night vision cameras and are not stars in the sky," Sanger wrote on his YouTube page. To avoid any confusion, he also mentioned that he left the time stamp of his video at its original 2011 setting, "so ignore that."
"There were a few cars coming and going out of the parking lot and they account for some of the light shifts. Unfortunately, I zoomed in too much and it destroyed the clarity of the video, but it still captures the amazing event that we witnessed."
The "we" Sanger refers to includes his friend, Gene Coleman, who also videotaped the UFO, but with a different night vision camera that produced the following black and white sequence:
On his YouTube page, Coleman notes that, as with Sanger's video, his on-screen time stamp is also incorrect. According to Coleman, "This first video was taken at approximately 8:50 p.m. Watch closely at the 3:56 mark as a string of lights appear to the left of the stationary object, then close in on it and suddenly turn into a larger object."
In both videos, the other lights temporarily seen at the far right side of the frame are, according to Sanger, "the radio towers on the mountain, out of focus, thus making them look odd."
The following map shows where this all took place on July 4:
On July 20, Sanger posted a short video of a daytime view of the same location from which he and Coleman shot their July 4 videos at night. In the next picture, the radio towers are seen at the right, and toward the left of the image center is the peak where the UFO was videotaped.
Sanger's video was also submitted to The Black Vault, an online repository for UFO research and declassified government documents. They asked him about the distance between those radio towers and the spot where the unusual colored lights were.
"The radio towers are approximately 8 to 10 miles away from where we videoed," Sanger told The Black Vault. "The radio tower lights are way out of focus and yet the UFO is in focus since I leave my lens at a setting that, on this particular camera, has stars, satellites and far off planes in focus without me having to change the focal setting."
It's unclear what the object in the sky might be. The Huffington Post reached out to several sources that evaluate UFO photos.
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