For a light source to be powerful enough to illuminate the ground clearly from that distance, the energy output has to be massive.
In the fall of 2014 a family of five was staying with grandparents in southeast Missouri while they hunted for a house. The grandparents' place sits on a big open property with clear views for miles, and about two miles to the north is Buford Mountain, a rugged ridge of red granite and rhyolite in Iron County.
The first strange thing happened around 11 one night on the front porch. A huge, very bright white light drifted slowly overhead, west to east, low enough that you could probably have hit it with a slingshot. No sound, no structure you could make out. It carried on for about a mile, faded, and was gone.
Within a week the lights had become a nightly thing, and the whole family would gather on the back porch to watch. One evening there were three red balls moving back and forth over the mountain in perfect formation, so tightly synced they looked connected even when they changed direction. Half joking, our witness started waving both arms at them. The three lights immediately turned and came straight at the house. The kids were hustled inside. Our witness and the grandparents stayed out, and the lights came within half a mile before splitting up and shooting off: one west, one east, one straight up.
The sighting that sticks with him most came on an evening when our witness and the 11-year-old son were finishing up a game of catch in the front yard. A red ball of light was hanging silently about half a mile west of the peak. It slid east over the summit, stopped dead, reversed, came back, paused, and then parked just west of the peak. Then it began to pulse. With each pulse a big circle of red light lit up a patch of the mountainside. Two flashes, then four more, six separate spots in quick succession, like it was working through a grid. Then it shot off and vanished in a flash.
That's the part that still doesn't add up. Our witness is an Air Force veteran with a physics degree, and lighting up the ground that clearly from two miles away takes a lot of power. In aviation, power like that comes with noise: engines, rotors, turbines. This was completely silent.
The family had already called in a UFO reporting group, and over the following month investigators came out, along with neighbours (one of them a state patrol officer), friends and relatives, and nearly all of them saw lights. One investigator filmed more than an hour of them. They even hiked the mountain together to take soil samples and Geiger counter readings.
The day after the mountain-scanning light was reported, our witness was home alone when the house started shaking, and got to the glass doors in time to see two black military helicopters roar over at treetop height, west to east. There was just time to snap a photo before they dropped behind the trees. It was one pass, and they never came back.
The lights kept coming for months, but the family eventually burned out and stopped looking, and the skies over Buford Mountain went quiet. More than a decade later, our physicist still can't explain any of it.