UFO Sighting near Tacoma

July 3, 2003 was the last day of a sailing cruise I made of South Puget Sound with friends Dave and Elana aboard the 36-ft sloop Quarters. At midday we emerged from the Tacoma Narrows and rounded Point Defiance on the way to our moorage on the east side of Commencement Bay. Out of Colvos Passage from the north flew a black helicopter that came to a halt mid-air and hovered at an altitude of perhaps 200 ft at a location between Gig Harbor and the southern tip of Vashon Island. We were close enough to see clearly that it was completely unmarked; none of its surfaces showed anything but a featureless black. It was not an attack helicopter and appeared more of the type that one might typically associate with, for instance, the FBI.

As we watched the helicopter hover, out of Colvos Passage came a large Coast Guard gunship at high speed. It slowed and stopped directly beneath the helicopter, then maneuvered in a tight circle. After about ten minutes, the helicopter sped off to the east about a half mile and again hovered; the Coast Guard gunship followed and repeated the circling maneuver beneath it. Over the next hour or so, Dave and Elana and I watched in fascination as this routine was repeated at least a half-dozen times at different locations in the area we were sailing through. Eventually both helicopter and gunship traveled back up Colvos Passage and out of view.

Late in the afternoon we reached our moorage and docked the boat. An hour later we had finished our chores and were relaxing in the cockpit, looking back across Commencement Bay to where we had seen the action earlier. By this time there was an unbroken, uniformly flat cloud cover with a ceiling I estimate at 3000-4000 ft. It was broad daylight, about 6:30 p.m. In the sky above the Bay appeared a flaring white light, the color and brightness of combusting magnesium. It seemed to sputter into full illumination and then glowed with a constant brightness. There were no tracers or streaming light to suggest that it was either a projectile or projection. The light was unmoving. Over the next minute or so, five identical phenomena occurred in the same part of the sky, one by one, over an area about the size of a beach ball held at arm's length.

When the lights first appeared they seemed to be randomly placed and motionless, but once the sixth was steadily shining, all began moving at a seeming high velocity, in straight and curved paths but still in the same part of the sky; they were by all evidence of the senses several miles away, approximately above Point Defiance, and beneath the clouds. Suddenly the six lights snapped into formation, a precise hexagonal shape. There were no adjustments in their final positions; the formation was created as though by a rubber band released onto a frame of six nails on a board, and just that quickly.

This formation of six lights then began to move as the individual lights had moved before, but in a somewhat larger part of the sky: straight paths and curving paths, fast then slow, but always retaining a geometrical preciseness to the arrangement. After another minute or so, the lights one by one began to flicker and sputter and diminish, though still in formation. Another minute, and they had all vanished.

We were flabbergasted. I haven't spoken with anyone else who saw this, nor have I seen any media reports. I have recently learned that this is a relatively common type of sighting, but I will not comment on any other reports except to say that we seem to have gotten a better show than most, and that I know of no technological means by which this phenomenon might have been created. I don't know if the black helicopter and the lights were connected in any way but it is certainly a curious coincidence.

I have not much followed or researched UFO stuff in the past because of the high frustration level associated with trying to separate wheat from chaff, and I have been reluctant to tell my story. Through the publicity surrounding the recent 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, however, I became aware of extraordinary statements being made by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Edgar Mitchell, and by Russian cosmonauts, and have been spending some time looking into the matter.