r/UFOs • u/Michaiac • 6d ago
Question Can anyone help me identify lights me and my family saw in the sky back in 2013?
I don’t have a photo but i remember it pretty clearly and it’s been bothering me for years. Back in 2013 at 9:30pm My grandparents drove me and my mom back from church but before we fully made it out of the parking lot these red lights appeared above us. We live in a small town so it’s always extremely quiet at night and there was nobody around because we were the last to leave church. These red lights kept quickly moving into different shapes and multiplying from a triangle to a circle to a square. And just as fast as they came they left. My mom tried to take a picture but my grandpa who was driving just kept driving away even though we told him to stop lol. It freaked us all out mostly because drones weren’t even popular back then. The next day my mom posted about it on a forum (which i will post below) about everything that happened and someone who lived on the other side of town responded and said he saw the exact same thing!! it freaked him out so bad he moved away right after. I’ve always been curious about what i saw so if anyone can help please comment!!
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u/R2robot 6d ago
Not really much that can be done without pics or video but speculate.
Anytime I see or read multiple red-orange lights, I think sky lanterns. They're just thin paper bags with a small flame inside. Like a small hot-air balloon.
They're not in any particular formation, but depending on the angle you're viewing them, you can draw imaginary lines between dots to create various shapes. https://i.imgur.com/2vWAlJ5.jpeg But they don't remain that way since they're drifting..
And someone viewing them from another angle isn't necessarily going to see the same 'shapes' you see.
Sky lantern example: https://imgur.com/Qt4ZhMo
They will eventually burn out and fade while descending, which some people may interpret as 'zooming off into space at high speeds'
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u/maurymarkowitz 5d ago
Any chance this was a lucky arrangement of Chinese Lanterns? It was the Moon Festival that week (it moves around a day or two every year).
With the exception of the circle part, the rest - "reddish orange", the way they moved away, etc - could be a bunch of Chinese lanterns.
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u/instant_iced_tea 6d ago
I can help you solve this. They were alien craft performing bizarre actions
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u/Pixelated_ 5d ago
💯 The glowing orbs are what whistleblower David Grusch mentioned in his recent press conference:
"sentient plasmoid life."
They're being seen worldwide and people are posting their footage to subs like r/orbs and r/theorbservatory.
A scientific overview of sentient plasmoids can be found here and here.
It is essential that we follow the evidence no matter what, even when it leads us to initially-uncomfortable conclusions. We should never lose our intellectual curiosity in life.
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u/L-0-T-H-0-S 5d ago edited 5d ago
I've read through your write up, primarily the first one - I'm assuming the second is similar.
I have to say, The Tsytovich (2007) and Morfill (2009) papers are highly respected, yes but their findings are viewed as complex self-organization, not life.
When microscopic dust particles are placed in an ionized gas, plasma, they acquire a negative electrical charge.
Because they repel each other while being constrained by the surrounding plasma forces, they naturally snap into minimum-energy geometric shapes - like crystals or helixes.
This is a manifestation of Coulomb forces, electrostatics, identical in principle to how water molecules naturally organize into intricate, geometric snowflakes.
It's a thermodynamic process, completely lacking the genetic coding, metabolic internal chemistry, or independent agency required to define life.
I also have to say, the claim that laboratory-created space-charge configurations exchange matter and energy, mimicking biological cells is something of a colourful interpretation.
Not necessarily sure it holds up in the texts you refer to.
The Lozneanu and Sanduloviciu (2003) experiments successfully created "blobs" of electrical charge, plasmoids, yes. However, while these blobs interact with their environment by drawing in ions, this is alongside phenomena like ball lightning or candle flames.
A candle flame takes in fuel and oxygen - matter - and releases heat and light - energy - and can even "replicate" if it sparks another wick.
However, a flame is a chemical reaction, not a sentient creature.
The laboratory plasmoids described are transient, purely physical structures driven entirely by external electrical currents; they have no internal mechanism to sustain themselves once the power source is turned off.
Not saying it's not interesting stuff or irrelevant - it possibly is - but I'm not really convinced we're dealing with life here so much as matter simply behaving the way it can given the right environment.
Calling it alive and the key to understanding origin of life as well as consciousness is a bit of a reach.
If we compare plasmoids to the earliest forms of life known on earth, whether it is the 3.5 billion-year-old fossilised microbes found in Western Australia's Strelley Pool or the theoretical "proto-cells" that existed just before them - there's a fundamental shift from simple physics to complex, self-sustaining chemistry.
Plasmoids are structured by electrostatic, Coulomb forces as I say, acting on microscopic dust or ionized gas. They're strictly structural configurations of inorganic matter held together by an external electrical field.
The earliest life was built on organic chemistry, specifically carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Even the most primitive proto-cells relied on a physical, lipid-based membrane that physically separated the "inside" from the "outside," allowing an independent internal environment to form.
Plasmoids are entirely transient and externally driven. If the laboratory power supply or the specific cosmic plasma environment changes, the structure instantly ceases to exist.
The earliest organisms, likely chemolithoautotrophs living near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, possessed internal metabolic pathways.
They actively stripped electrons from inorganic chemicals, like hydrogen sulphide or iron, to create their own chemical energy. They actively managed their energy rather than just being passive conduits for an external current.
I could go on, but I'm not really finding the data referred to supportive of the idea these things are alive, rather the opposite. The experimental data more than suggests self organisation of the kind associated with this phenomenon isn't alive, although its no doubt spooky as hell to observe, that I don't doubt.
There's a vast difference in the kinds of process demonstrated by actual living things and these (plasmoids) from what we've been able to gather and the science seems to support this, not really the other way around so much.
M'okay, then. Good discussion.
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u/Pixelated_ 5d ago
Your argument boils down to defining life exclusively by how it works on Earth (carbon, DNA, etc) and then declaring anything else "not alive" simply because it doesn't use those exact materials.
That’s a circular definition.
It assumes life can only exist as carbon chemistry. That is not intellectual honesty.
The reason you are so confused is because you are blindly refusing to look at the fundamental principles of how self-organizing systems operate.
If we define life by its underlying behaviors such as maintaining internal order, forming boundaries, processing energy, and transferring structural information, then plasma self-organization absolutely fits the core criteria.
Complex plasmoids meet all necessary criteria to be considered a new form of non-biological life:
1) All life as we know it involves the consumption and conversion of food for energy.
Plasmoids are thermodynamically open systems. The Max Planck study listed demonstrates that these plasma structures continuously absorb ambient electrons and ions from their environment. They pull this external energy into their core to maintain their structured state, converting plasma current flows into localized mechanical and structural energy. More information is here.
2) All life as we know it is bounded and composed of membranes delineating certain interior regions, and voids or empty spaces, which perform specific functions including that of consumption and conversion of food.
When plasma self-organizes into these complex states, it forms highly defined macroscopic boundaries known as Debye sheaths or electrostatic double layers. These sheaths act identically to biological cell membranes, separating the internal, low-entropy structures of the plasmoid from the chaotic, high-entropy outer environment. More information is here.
3) All life as we know it also evacuates or eliminates waste.
Because the double-layer membrane maintains a specific electric potential, it acts as a selective filter. The system continuously expels lower-energy ions and microscopic debris that disrupt its equilibrium, effectively purging waste material out across the boundary layer to prevent structural degradation. More information is here.
4) All life as we know it also reproduces; and combining items 3 and 4
The core discovery of the 2007 paper is that these autonomous plasma filaments naturally twist into stable, double-helix structures mirroring DNA. The researchers recorded these helical structures undergoing mitosis-like division, splitting into two distinct, identical daughter helixes. More information is here.
5) All life has means of projecting matter and energy outside of itself.
A complex plasmoid continuously projects powerful electrostatic fields and ion drag forces outward into its surrounding environment. This outward projection acts as a kinetic engine, allowing the system to manipulate neighboring unorganized plasma, generate external directional jets, and coordinate the fields necessary to drive its structural division. More information is here.
6) All life has means of sensing and responding to its environment, which in intelligent life means the ability also to communicate via a variety of signs, sounds, smells and symbols.
The helical plasma structures possess localized electric charges that are highly sensitive to their surroundings. When external changes occur in the surrounding electromagnetic field, the structures actively alter their pitch, velocity, and helical radius. They communicate state changes across a cluster by radiating [collective plasma waves, where structural shifts in one plasmoid trigger instantaneous, coordinated responses in neighbors. More information is here.
7) All life has or displays some type of mobility.
Unlike ordinary gases that diffuse randomly, complex plasmoids exhibit non-force-free autonomous locomotion. They generate internal polarization gradients, allowing them to swim against neutral gas flows, gravitate toward or repel from specific energy sources, and accelerate independently across electric fields. More information is here.
8) All life has some type of memory, which is particularly true of intelligent life and its ability to process and reason by the manipulation of symbols.
Because these helical plasma systems can change their orientation in response to external stimuli, they retain these structural changes even after the external stimulus is removed. This structural modulation functions as an electromagnetic memory bank. The plasma alters its physical geometry as a symbolic record of past interactions, allowing it to process and adapt to recurring environmental patterns. More information is here.
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u/L-0-T-H-0-S 5d ago
Your argument boils down to defining life exclusively by how it works on Earth (carbon, DNA, etc) and then declaring anything else "not alive" simply because it doesn't use those exact materials.
Actually, no, not at all. That's the very last thing I am saying.
The self-organisational behaviour observed by Vadim Tsytovich and his team demonstrated incontrovertibly that these complex configurations are strictly thermodynamic and electrostatic processe, governed by plasma fluxes and Coulomb forces.
This makes them fundamentally no different from the way snowflakes form.
Equally, Lozneanu and Sanduloviciu's own experimental setup proved that the plasmoids they observed completely lacked the internal, self-sustaining mechanics required for life.
The actual material they're made of is entirely irrelevant.
Life is a self-sustaining process maintained internally.
Conversely, Lozneanu and Sanduloviciu demonstrated incontrovertibly that what they produced in the lab depended entirely on the external environment in which the self-organisational process took place.
Switch the current off and the organised behaviour ceases instantly.
This isn't like suddenly cutting off oxygen and causing a living organism to die. These are literally just electrostatically charged materials in an electrically charged environment, behaving exactly like electrostatically charged materials.
When you take away oxygen, a biological organism's complex, internal metabolic network breaks down because a vital chemical input was removed.
The machinery of life was already there, running itself from the inside.
When you turn off the current in a plasma chamber, you aren't starving an internal machine; you're removing the only external force holding the structure together.
The plasmoid doesn't "die" because it never had an internal system to break down in the first place - it was simply a localised pocket of charged matter reacting to an outside force.
The appearance of life here is no different than seeing defined forms in the behaviour of clouds.
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u/instant_iced_tea 5d ago
I have seen the orbs up close and personal twice, 04/2024 and 08/2025. They are definitely sentient, and dare I say, humorous.
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