Witness Reports Multiple Sightings of Anomalous Orange Orbs in Arizona

The Singular Fortean Society received the following report of anomalous orange orbs in Arizona from a witness via email on June 5th, 2024.

The witness asked to be referred to as Mars.

I recently read one of your articles titled something along the lines of "glowing orbs/eyes" and in this article it mentions Peralta Trail Road being a "hotspot," which I'd like to add to with my own experiences of the outer east valley and superior area.
One late evening me and my family were driving back from camping and had to pass through Florence. While on the highway at about 10 p.m., on I want to say December of 2011 or 2012, I experienced my first UFO sighting. A series of flashing, (or perhaps an object spinning) amber glow appeared over the sky towards the northeast—almost Superstition Mountain area.
It started low in the sky and started off very slow, there were few clouds in the sky, and you could see their glow illuminate the clouds for a brief second before appearing higher in the sky, then darting to the right and becoming bigger, before going black and showing up as barely a speck in the sky but further west this time. I was only a kid then, around 12, I had gotten out my camera and started to record however my camera ended up dying before I could film the entirety.
Looking back at it, I did manage to get about one frame of a glowing orb in the sky, but it was so far away that I didn't bother to save or export it. My entire family was freaking out and as I passed a few parking lots there were people looking towards the sky with cameras and some cars pulled over to the side. I believe it even was broadcast on the news a week later.
May 15th, 2023, 8p.m.
I was driving towards Gold Canyon headed east on the US 60, at around 7:50 p.m. I see a large orange flash in the clouds close to the horizon and thinking it could've been a fire again in the Superstitions, I kept my eye on the area. A few minutes passed and there it was, the same pattern of either something spinning/rotating in the sky or moving across it with a slow strobe pattern, except this time it was much bigger and closer than I had seen it years ago, and this time it seemed almost directly over the Peralta Trail area or close to it.
I felt as if I knew what I was looking at was the same thing I had seen as a kid just based off how the soft amber glow moved in the sky, it was identical. Its pattern was similar, moving in the sky with no real sense of exact destination but just a whole lot closer this time. I reached for my phone, and it went away. I hit record and it popped up again briefly and I was able to take a small two-second clip before disappearing and not coming back for the hours I spent looking across the night sky.
I've spent my entire life looking at the sky in this area, hoping to find something like what I saw as a kid all those years ago, it's an odd sense of accomplishment to actually get it on camera this time instead of the single frame I got years ago. I'd love to send in the stills from the video that I captured; however, I don't see the option to attach files so please email me if you're interested.

Investigator Tobias Wayland replied to the initial report with several questions, including a request to view any photographic or video evidence.

Mars responded, sending along the requested evidence and agreeing to its use in this article.

"Here is the video and a few small stills. I captured it on my phone right before it disappeared at night [during the May 15th, 2023, encounter], so it's not the best quality," she said. "At this point, it's pretty far from me, but based on the first time I seen the lights across the sky, they were much higher and smaller. The ones in the sky in the pictures were the largest they appeared which would be about three centimeters in person. Nothing unusual happened after the most recent time it happened but the time before that my digital camera stopped working and said low battery until a few minutes later and it worked again (of course lol)."

Pictured above: the images sent in by Mars.

Since it can be difficult to judge the distance of aerial objects, it is unclear what the actual size of the objects seen by Mars was, although the relative size of three centimeters from her perspective could indicate that they were fairly large based on its estimated distance.

The Peralta Trail is roughly five kilometers from US 60, so any objects above it that appeared to be three centimeters from Mars’ perspective could have been up to 150 meters in diameter. However, without precise measurements, their size is impossible to judge definitively.

Mars said the objects seemed to move with intelligence.

"They moved rhythmically in the sky, as if something was rotating or shifting across the sky," she explained. "One would turn on and then slowly dim out as the next light appeared close next to it (which gave it the almost string-of-light look in the picture). It moved the same way I seen it 12-ish or so years ago. It was definitely the same series of flashing lights in the sky that I seen as a kid."

Since then, she said, “I feel like I'm always looking out for what might be there.”

An enlarged image of the orbs filmed by Mars.

The article referenced by Mars was a ‘Reports from the Void’ that described a series of anomalous glowing orb sightings which reportedly occurred “out in the desert, east towards the mountains on the alluvial plain at the vidock curve of the Florence Junction east of Phoenix, Arizona.”

Sightings of mysterious glowing orbs are relatively common and are sometimes associated with a variety of anomalous phenomena including ghosts, aliens, and bigfoot and other cryptids.

In early 2023, North Carolina man Christopher Bledsoe recounted a series of encounters with seemingly intelligent glowing orbs to British tabloid the Daily Mail.

And later that year, The Singular Fortean Society was contacted by Georgia resident Paula Adams, who wished to report an anomalous glowing orb seen by her and her daughter one Sunday night.

Also in 2023, a witness reported psychic contact with a series of spherical objects to The Singular Fortean Society.

In addition, a man in Indiana near the Prairie Creek Reservoir has spoken to The Singular Fortean Society about a series of glowing orb sightings that span from 1981 to 2020 which could be related to winged humanoid sightings in the area.

And in 2022, The Singular Fortean Society was contacted by Shane Taylor, 44, who wished to report an encounter with a multitude of seemingly friendly orange orbs he’d had on Christmas Eve of 2014.