Late Father's CD-ROM Backup Yields Photo of Slow Lights Over Arizona Mountains

TUCSON, ARIZ. — A Reddit user posting to r/UFOs reports that, while clearing the garage of a father who died about three months ago, a spindle of backup CD-ROMs came to light, and on one of them a photograph that has held the author's attention ever since.

According to the post, the discs date from roughly 2003 or 2004, when the father had a local photofinishing shop digitize older 35mm rolls. The folder name places the image near Tucson, Arizona, in late 1998, during one of many road trips the father took for his construction work. The author is unsure whether the camera was a Minolta X-700 or a Canon AE-1, recalling chiefly its heavy manual 50mm lens and the click of its shutter.

The author writes that the father, on returning home in 1998, mentioned in passing some strange lights over the Catalina mountains. He declined to show the prints to the author and an older cousin, two young space enthusiasts raised on Discovery Channel and Unsolved Mysteries, and told them they watched too much television.

The father's account, as relayed in the post, is this: the object moved so slowly that it seemed to hover motionless. He first took the lights for separate, unrelated points in the distance, then noticed a faint dark structure joining them and concluded it was a single enormous craft. It remained in view about five minutes. When he turned to search his truck and looked back, it was gone.

The father offered his own mundane explanation in later years. According to the author, he said it was probably a military test craft from Davis-Monthan or Luke Air Force Base and nothing to get worked up about.

The author asks whether the image could show military flares, a test from a nearby base, or an optical artifact or reflection, or something else entirely. The original negative, the post notes, was lost in a family move to Texas in 2000, leaving only the low-resolution scan from the 2003 disc.