Everything felt incredibly silent and still. It felt like being in a separate bubble of reality.
It was just after midnight on January 12, 2008. An 18-year-old was asleep in the spare room at their dad's house in Mossley Hill, a leafy part of south Liverpool, when the dad came in and wouldn't take no for an answer. Get up. Come to the front bedroom. Look at this.
Out the front window, somewhere between 100 and 200 glowing balls were moving over the neighbourhood. They looked like plasma, maybe 15 to 30 feet across, mostly orange and red but now and then flickering to green or purple. They were low, 50 to 100 feet above the rooftops, and completely silent. They travelled in a line, and the movement was odd: one orb would sit dead still, then jump instantly to something like 40 mph to catch up with the one ahead of it, then stop again.
Father and kid watched for about ten minutes. Then the dad went downstairs for a camera and told the teenager to stay put, because he was worried about what these things might be. The 18-year-old watched alone for a few more minutes and then, somehow, ended up back in bed asleep. There's no memory of walking back to the spare room. It could have been grogginess. It still bothers our witness.
The next morning the dad filled in the rest. He had grabbed one of the family's two little Olympus digital cameras, the ones they normally kept in waterproof housings for scuba diving and had used thousands of times without a hiccup. In the back garden the orbs were low and bright enough to light the yard. And it was dead quiet: no wind, no insects, no traffic, on a weekend night with the pubs letting out nearby. He said it felt like being in a separate bubble of reality.
The camera fought him. The first few shots came out pure black. Video wouldn't start, and when it finally did, the file wouldn't play back. Eventually he got a few stills. In those, the orbs looked blue-green instead of orange, and some that were hidden behind the house from where he stood showed up anyway, fuzzy and faint, as if their light had come through the building.
The dad called the local paper and the police. Nobody else had reported anything. When the teenager, who was taking flying lessons at the time, mentioned it to an instructor, an ex-RAF pilot, the instructor advised against reporting it and quietly shared a story of his own from his military flying days.
For about six months afterward, the family saw more things over the same spot, this time in daylight: small, high silver-white spheres that would appear out of nothing, multiply, slide into one another, and shrink away again. A neighbour saw one hang there for eight hours. Then the family bought a big telescope for the garden, and the visits stopped.
Our witness eventually backed away from the whole subject and has spent the years since working as a 3D artist. As they put it, they know it was real, and it still scares them in ways they can't quite explain.