BOCA RATON — For more than three hours it floated above homes in Boca Raton: a neon-green light that no one could explain.

“It’s nothing like I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Mark Smith, 19.

Smith and his friends went outside about 9 p.m. Monday where they saw it: a glowing object about the size of a football. Smith said it was oblong and hovered about 200 or 300 feet in the air above a neighbor’s home in the Palm Beach Farms neighborhood. The skies were clear. There was no wind. They called police and followed it around.

A Boca Raton police officer actually drove out to see what was the fuss. The results?

“One of the officers said he saw the green light,” said Officer Sandra Boonenberg, spokeswoman for the department.

The object moved slowly for most of the time, but also did some acrobatics.

“It pretty much darted across the sky, it zig-zagged a bunch of times, did a bunch of crazy flips,” said Smith’s friend, Ryan Helfrich, 19.

He said about 40 neighbors came outside and watched the lights float about a half-block from where it was first spotted. They said the object just “faded away” after midnight.

According to the Mutual UFO Network, which tracks UFO sightings around the world, there have been at least six other reports of possible UFOs in Palm Beach County this year. Broward County has had at least 11. The reports range from strange lights to flaming spheres and floating metallic cylinders. Eric Vandernoot, an astronomer at Florida Atlantic University, told WPTV-Ch.5 the sighting is probably easily explained.

“I think it’s something here of earth — nothing extra terrestrial,” he said.

Vandernoot guessed that it could have been a hoax. He said someone could have flashed a green laser onto a balloon or something else floating in the sky.

A National Weather Service representative in Miami laughed when asked whether the object could have been some bizarre weather phenomenon.

“You’re going to have to call NASA,” he said.

NASA, for its part, didn’t know specifically of the Boca Raton sighting.

“It sounds like it might be a balloon, a weather balloon,” said Dwayne Brown, a NASA spokesman. “We certainly get our share of calls. Some of the times it can be anything from a piece of falling debris from somewhere. It could be a meteorite.”

Smith said he’s sure wasn’t falling debris or a balloon. What he does know is this: He wants to see it again.

“It’s very, very cool,” he said. “I keep driving by the spot every day, hoping I would see it again.”
By Brian Haas, Sun-Sentinel

Tags: boca, football, green, nasa, national, police, UFO, Weather

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 11:27 am and is filed under Weird News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.