Reports from the Void: 'Maybe a UFO Beacon?'

Reports from the Void is a repository to share those stories for which I do not have enough information to make a full report. This is usually because of little or no communication from the witness following their initial submission. I will always provide as much information as possible regarding any correspondence during my attempts to speak with those involved.

This series is meant only to present you with the full breadth of the information sent to me and makes no judgments about the veracity of any stories shared within it.

I received the following report via email on July 31st, 2024.

The email’s subject line read “UAP’s…? A couple very different types!?”

1st Thing: Giant chartreuse oval in sky. Single event.
LOCATION: About 1968, Mt. Pleasant, UT; Walking from dorm, across campus to gym/dining room. Late for lunch. Distance was the length of a football field plus the width of a field from the building.
CONDITIONS: Broad daylight, crystal clear blue sky, only a few white clouds low on horizon, miles away, crisp temps, intermittent brisk gusty winds.
WITNESSES: Only two other students anywhere visible, going same direction ahead of me, who seemed oblivious; I tried to get them to look and comment but they merely glanced, then returned to their intense conversation.
OBJECT: Huge, easily 300 feet across horizontally and nearly that vertically. About a perfect oval, and looked to be some distance farther away than the row of buildings we were headed towards.
Almost the entire interior of the oval was very remarkably, as if lit from behind, chartreuse, but [had] a texture very like fairly smooth clouds [that were] tinted the wrong color. The colored area did not entirely fill the whole oval, [it had] an edging band around the oval [that was] a very deep color, which looked just like looking into the deep night sky—including seeing a few stars within that dark band.
A thinner edge demarcated the dark edging from the daylight blue sky.
And it never moved, despite the strong gusty winds—if ground level was gusty, then, the elevation of that oval would have had MUCH more wind—but it stayed still during the whole walk, [at] about [a distance of] 520 feet.
It SEEMED as though something within it wanted to communicate, but it did not feel scary.
I wanted to stay outside to see what it might do, and to try “thinking to it”, but was too hungry to miss a meal; so, [I] ate as fast as [I was] able, and ran back out—to empty, light blue sky.
NOTES: That area had suffered a disastrous military nerve gas spill in approximately 1964. Military long denied it. Military has chronically conducted a number of secret experiments, which public is not told about, nor compensated for, using citizens as lab rats.
Could that chartreuse oval have been one of those?
*****
2nd Thing: White laser checkmark in sky. Repeated events.
LOCATION: 1990s, PNW, USA. First Three events were Mid-Oregon latitude, I-5 NB, and a second single event was at an elevation of 300 feet in a rural area, about 35 miles SW of Olympia, WA.
The Thing always seemed to be in the same sector of sky, same elevation, out over the ocean west of approximately Salem, OR, every time.
WITNESSES: Only I saw the first three.
The fourth one was also seen by our minister, who became extremely terrified and couldn’t get away fast enough (very large woman, hiking a hill with me).
CONDITIONS: Mostly clear; some variables. three were in the middle of the night, July/August; the fourth was at early dusk, the set sun still lit western sky, in late August or early Sept.
VISIBILITY: Clear enough to see for many miles.
OBJECT: [I’m] not experienced with guessing altitude, but holding [my] arm perpendicular to [my] body, then raising [my pinched] fingers to about 20-degrees higher than perpendicular, the Object made a rapid, thin-lined, perfect, acute-angled laser-checkmark against the backdrop of dark clouds, which might have been the width of a nickel held between the edges of [my pinched] fingers….the checkmark was very like a white laser light, but, it could ...not… have been made with any toy lasers—and could ...not… have been from land-based laser.
….no flying Object could be seen; only the split-second formation of a single, laser-white-light checkmark, then, that was gone just as fast. Each event was a single checkmark….no other things seen in sky except a couple small planes closer to land, and a couple commercial flights out of Portland or SeaTac—because [there is] a major flight path is in that sector.
NOTES: Conversations with a couple professional astronomers, got no helpful info.
But news stories on radio in the 1990s sporadically warned the public against playing with laser light gadgets pointed at the sky, because it could cause aircraft emergencies. The radio stations were in OR. TV Mainstream news carried the warning a number of times.
Again: the same sky sector every time; a single checkmark, every time; and it happened too far out over the ocean for a land-based hand-held laser gadget to create anything remotely like those checkmarks—that tech just did not exist in the 1990s, at least not publicly; I’d be surprised if it did, even now, in 2024. Media was trying to gaslight the public with “swamp gas” explanations!
Again, I got the feeling Those were trying to communicate and felt no fear of them.
Those did not happen every year, only random years; we took a two-week vacation north, annually, but varying dates.
It only was seen when we were driving northbound on I-5 and looking westward, or, the last time, standing on a hill, facing SW—putting it still in the same sector of sky, at the same elevation.
One event? Curious! Two events? Coincidence! Three events? Hmmmm! Four events? It’s SOMETHING! It’s repeatable; it’s only a single event each night seen, and they do not happen regularly, apparently.
Not a manmade beacon. But maybe a UFO beacon?

I replied to the witness’s email in an attempt to gather more information about the sightings but received no response.

Chartreuse is not necessarily an unusual color for a UFO.

In 2021, two separate aircraft, one military and one civilian, "reported seeing a bright green flying object" to Canada's Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System (CADORS), and aerial green fireballs are also commonly reported, such as those recorded over Wisconsin, USA, and Akademgorodok, Russia, in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

That this sighting took place during the daytime, however, is unusual. This seems to rule out misidentifications of meteors and similar natural phenomena, while the object’s resistance to wind likely precludes easy identification as a balloon.

As for the odd, seemingly projected “check mark,” it may be worth mentioning that a U.S. Navy patent application published in February of 2020 describes the use of laser induced plasma, “a method where a laser beam is configured to generate a laser-induced plasma filament (LIPF), and the LIPF acts as a decoy to detract a homing missile or other threat from a specific target.”

Since the “laser induced plasma emission spectra covers a wide electromagnetic spectrum, from Infrared (IR) to Visible (VIS) and up to Ultraviolet region (UV) … [and] it is possible to generate multiple wavelengths just by ‘tuning’ the laser parameters,” one could assume that the device would be capable of creating a ‘UFO’ that is visible not only to the sensors of an IR homing missile, but also to the naked eye.

Although this patent application was not submitted until decades after the above witness’s sighting, there’s no telling whether a developmental version or other similar technology might have been in use at the time.