Breaking: UFOs over East Side of Cincinnati Tonight

Cincinnati, OH - Three witnesses and two separate reports of a vertically shaped UFO over the east side of Cincinnati tonight between 7:50 and 8pm. The first caller to the Cincinnati UFO Hotline (513-876-5UFO) described five "huge" orange, oval-shaped lights stacked-up vertically over the east side of Downtown Cincinnati visible from his Ft. Wright, KY neighborhood. The lights eventually faded out, and then a sixth single light became visible.

The second caller was driving with his girlfriend on OH St. Rt. 32 when she pointed out what appeared to be an "explosion in the sky" over the Batavia / Eastgate Mall area. A string of four lights came down from it, fading in and out. The objects became solid and started zig-zagging across the sky.

Additional unverified witnesses on the KY side of the river in Newport, east of the Levee, claimed to have saw 3 lights over Cincinnati around the same time. Did you witness this UFO event? Send us your report.

Update 9:35pm: Additional witnesses have contacted us regarding their own sightings across the area tonight. One possible explanation offered by e-mailer #3 was "parachutists over Nippert Stadium for the UC football game."

E-mail Report #1: "We saw the same UFO tonight in Northern Kentucky.  We were on 471 North by the Southgate/Fort Thomas exit and we saw four lights in the west part of the sky.  They were semi-circular on the bottom with a lid type appearance on top.  It looked as though there were four lights and then went off and came back on in random patterns.  They were distinctly clear with no diffusion of light.  We reported it to 700 WLW and Fox 19.  Both news sources stated they had received multiple calls and WLW informed us that they had called the police and made a report.  The police stated that they believed they were parachuters for the UC vs Uconn game tonight.  We don’t think so!  WLW radio sounded skeptical of this explanation as well and was anxiously awaiting video of the event or more detail."

E-mail Report #2: "My boyfriend and I saw them too.  We were just leaving Kenwood driving down 71 south and to my right, out the passenger side window, looking over the Ridge Ave/Madisonville area were 4 glowing lights in formation.  One faded in and out. The trees obscured my vision but as the 71 curved back they were visible through the windshield again, then there were only 3 lights.  Then as we got off the Red Bank Rd exit the trees obscured them again.  I called my mom immediately after they disappeared behind the trees the first time, my phone says I made that call at 7:51 pm.

"It was the strangest thing I've ever seen.  I don't believe in stuff like this but I saw it with my own eyes.  It was completely unexplainable. They weren't planes, they weren't objects WITH lights ATTACHED to them.  The whole thing glowed, a warm color too, like a yellowy gold color light, whatever they were. I tried to take a picture with my cellphone but it's so grainy you can't even make it out."

Update: 10:30pm: Several more e-mail reports, one with iPhone video. Another comment about a possible skydiving team's responsibility.

"My brother in law pulled up to our house, he ran in, said he saw a comet break up in the sky.  We (my wife, brother in law, and mother in law, and I) ran outside  to see it.  What we saw was crazy!  There was four comet looking objects in the sky (head and firey tails).  We still thought they were comets but then they never fell they just hovered and swirled around.  One would fade out and then come back.  Eventually they just descended down towards the earth and we couldn't see them anymore. I recorded it on my iphone..."



"i have a picture. my friend said it's a shooting star, then when it broke into four pieces we knew it was more than a shooting star. we continued to watch four balls of fire floating in mid air. we chased it down the block and we saw it until it faded completely..." [Ed. Note: Waiting to receive the picture.]

"My wife and I saw the lights and pulled over and tried taking a video with her digital camera in the Kenwood area. We lost them behind a building though before getting a good shot. They were clearly falling objects. It was a skydiving team, and they INTENDED for people to report a bunch of UFO sightings, especially with creating the illusion of a rapidly expanding and contracting plus disappearing and reappearing object."

Update 11:00pm: Three new callers to the hotline, one with skydiving experience who says there's "no way" what he saw could have been skydivers. One with a photo.

The first caller saw 6 bright objects in the sky, far east of Christ Hospital on the east side of Cincinnati. He and his wife witnessed the objects from their home in Price Hill. He waited to see if Fox 19 said anything about it on their 10pm news broadcast but they didn't. He has been skydiving before and says that from where he saw the object, if they were skydivers, they could not have glided far enough to hit Nippert Stadium with the object's rate of descent. They were "maintaining too well, like they were stopped. There's no way skydivers could hold that perfect." His wife chimed in, "I've never seen skydivers like that!" He tried to get a picture but the object was no longer visible by the time he had the camera ready. A small plane was seen in the area at the time of the sighting, as was a passenger jet much higher in the sky.The couple reported that police in District 2 (far eastern side of Cincinnati) were flooded with calls about strange objects in the sky.

The witness called his brother in Adams County, OH to relate the details of his sighting and his brother confirmed that it sounds highly similar to something he had seen in his secluded neck of the woods twice in the past several days. The Adams County sightings were followed by two jet fighters flying side by side, as if they had been called to investigate. When the lights there dimmed out, you'd "see a tail on them like a meteor."

The next caller saw the lights from the Crestview Hills Mall in Northern Kentucky. He saw four lights turning on and off, moving towards each other. They did not look to belong to an aircraft or some type of natural phenomenon. He noted that wcpo.com mentioned the skydivers to Nippert Stadium, and he accepted this explanation.

WCPO reports that "It was the Warren County Team Fastrax exhibition sky diving club. The four skydivers wearing bright lights jumped out of the plane together, split into two pairs, and then descended individually. Viewers as far away as Burlington, Kentucky called to report seeing the strange lights."

The latest caller also saw four lights, but they had what looked like "fire" coming off of them. She snapped a photo. "We saw these objects hovering in the sky as we were driving on Rt. 71 S (4 miles from Paul Brown stadium). "officially" called skydivers with pyro-technics?!?!"

Update 12:00am: A new caller to the hotline saw the lights from the Sharonville area on his way to work. Several new email reports.

Facing southwesterly at 7:54pm, the caller saw four lights doing the same pattern as seen in the earlier iPhone video. The lights didn't go up or down, they appeared to be stationary. Several people were standing in the Kroger parking lot watching the lights, some trying to snap cell phone photos. Eventually all of the lights blinked out. Afterwards 3-4 airplanes came to the area and could be heard from the ground, as if they were searching for the lights.

E-mail report: "Driving through Northside (Central Cincinnati) headed east on Dane, looking directly ahead (East) above the treeline of Mt. Storm, at around 7:55 PM EST, I saw four large (1/2 thumbnail at arm's length) yellow-gold lights, hovering in a loose grouping, shimmering, alternately fading and growing brighter. Stopped and got out of my car and watched for a few minutes in amazement as the lights remained suspended in their loose pattern. The shape of these lights was of an elongated tear-drop on its side, with the smaller pointed end to the left and larger round end to the right. They did not seem to move from left to right in a linear path, but more up and down, left and right, expanding and contracting the overall area of their cluster.

"While I watched, two of these lights peeled back into a sort of inverted comma-shape and with a downward twisting motion, disappeared, only to re-appear in a few seconds back to the original shape and size. After a little bit more of this (under a minute?) they all faded into dark, and then after maybe 10-15 seconds, one of the lights (at the bottom of the "cluster") re-appeared. There also appeared to be at least two conventional aircraft in the vicinity of these lights, visible by much smaller regularly blinking lights (red, green, white) that moved in the steady linear fashion typical of airplanes. The phenomena I saw looked more like four wings of flame, aqueous and glowing, related but not linked, more organic than mechanical"

E-mail report: "I was driving south on I-71 and saw lights appear out of nowhere like an explosion. At first, I thought it may have been a meteor but it was too close. Then I thought they were falling stars, but they stopped (and even shouted to my son, "Look at all those falling stars!"). For a second, I thought they were fireworks but realized very quickly that the lights, which appeared to be falling slowly a short distance, stopped falling. They hovered there in the sky and appeared to "take shape" The shape I saw was round on one end (presumably the back end because they appeared to be pointed slightly downward) and pointed on the other end. They moved into a perfect formation and faded in and out. The most I ever saw at once was 5, but most of the time when I could see them, there were only 4. I thought it must have had something to do with a game at the stadium, but as I watched, I couldn't think of anything that would have just hovered there like that. Then I thought it could have been flares but I don't think such a planned formation is possible with flares.

"As the road curved, I could no longer see them. I passed the place where I saw them and suddenly saw them reappear again in the sky. This time, because I was looking to the sky to find them, I saw that "ball" of light fall and break up again. The "ball" wasn't visible to me for a long period of time (maybe a split second) before it broke up into separate parts. This time, though, the most I saw was 4. They hovered there for quite a while, fading in and out like the last time, and were pointed slightly downward again. I think I remember a small plane flying by them, too, but I can't be positive about that. It seems like I may have seen several small planes later, or the same one multiple times.

"I'm not sure that I fully believe in this stuff, but what I saw was real. These lights were NOT skydivers. The light fully and equally emanated from each object until it faded, then was fully lit again. The light looked like a glowing yellow to me and the none of the lights appeared to turn in any direction the way you would expect skydivers to turn. These things were completely controlled. I was in shock! I tried to take a picture with my phone but with the movement of the car and the size of the lights, nothing showed on the screen, so I didn't take a picture.

Update 12:50am: E-mail report as follows.

"My daughter and I were returning from Columbus when she pointed out the lights. We were just north of exit 25 (King's Island) on I-71 headed south.  When I saw the lights there were 4 of them in a large triangular pattern.  One appeared to fall out the sky in pieces.  We talked about it when we got home and she said that at first she thought it was fire works at Kings island (which was closed).  When we reached the exit the lights were gone."

Total number of reports: 23
Total number of known witnesses: 35