Dan Thrift/Nevada Appeal News Service Allan Brown with equipment he used to capture images over Lake Tahoe early Wednesday morning.
The light in the sky that changed from red to orange to amber and popped side to side, up and down and disappeared and reappeared over Lake Tahoe Wednesday morning between 3:30 and 5:30 wasn't a star, planet or airplane, swears Allan Brown.
It was an unidentified flying object that "was so real, it had me scared," the 44-year-old South Lake Tahoe resident insists.
"It was not a glitch of light or a flash in the sky. It moved and changed colors," he said.
Whatever it was - alien space craft from Planet XYZ on a doomsday colonization planning mission to Lake Tahoe or, perhaps, the waning light of a star protruding through a canopy of high clouds - something was clearly visible through the lens of Brown's video camera, with which he taped the object dancing in the sky between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m.
Standing outside his Tallac Avenue home smoking a cigarette on the porch, Brown spotted the object in the sky to the northwest.
The light stood out like no others that night, he said. It was colder than most nights but virtually cloudless with no wind.
In quick-thinking mode, he grabbed his video camera, walked to the lake and began taping.
The more he taped, the surer he became that the object in the sky was anomalous.
"It was bigger than any of the stars out that night. It hovered really close to the lake and above the mountains. It wasn't like it was a star in the sky. This was in our atmosphere," said Brown, who swears his only vice is cigarettes and that he doesn't drink alcohol or take drugs.
Allen Kenitzer with the public affairs office of the Federal Aviation Administration in Seattle said there were no reports of objects from air personnel in the Reno and Sacramento regions.
A spokesperson for Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert also had no reports. A spokesman for the Reno-Tahoe International Airport said an experimental aircraft manned by the Sierra Nevada Corp. has flown in and out of the Stead Airport and may be mistaken as a UFO. A call to Sierra Nevada Corp. was not returned Thursday.
The Seattle-based UFO Reporting Center was also unavailable for comment.
Whatever it was, Brown is convinced that what he saw was out of this world.
"Seeing it has made me question who we are and how we fit into the galactic picture," he said. "We on Earth may be one of many worlds with life on it."