Ufo Report Has Its Spin Hovering ‘Ball Of Rainbow’ With Ring Of Lights No Yarn, Say Several Spokane Valley Residents

They aren’t saying it was some kind of Klingon spaceship, and they aren’t saying it was a James Bond spy plane.

But they are saying it was weird.

Several people saw something unusual hovering in the skies over the Spokane Valley between 8 and 9 p.m. Thursday. One family captured it on videotape.

Tessa Whipkey, 13, said she had the closest encounter of them all.

Tessa and her 11-year-old brother, John, climbed onto the roof of the family’s garage near 12th and McDonald in the Valley for a closer look. Their grandmother had called moments earlier to say she saw a ball of light in the sky.

“It looked like a ball of rainbow, just spinning out everywhere,” Tessa said. John ran inside for a camera.

The Evergreen Junior High student swears the object raced toward her, stopping 30 feet above her. She ran screaming into the house.

Sound like a crazy kid story? Maybe. But when Tessa tells it, her blue eyes turn red and watery, she shakes and chokes on the words.

The phone call that provoked Tessa’s nighttime adventure was one in a string that started with a Valley couple living on Liberty Avenue near Park Road.

Julie and Randy Stone were just getting into bed at about 8 p.m. when they noticed what looked like a giant white star outside.

It had a ring of rainbow-colored lights at the bottom. With binoculars, Julie Stone said she could see that the glowing globe was spinning.

Stone said what she saw wasn’t Comet Hyakutake.

“I know what (the comet) looks like. That wasn’t the comet,” she said.

Stone then called neighbor Lea Rosales, who is Tessa’s grandmother.

“I’m not an alien chaser or anything, but I saw something,” Rosales said. “If the moon were a basketball, it would have been a baseball.”

Rosales thought maybe it was a weather balloon or plane, because she lives near Felts Field.

Norman MacDonald, who works at the private air field’s front desk, said he hadn’t heard about anything strange that night.

MacDonald and Douglas Klaue, a Felts Field pilot, said weather balloons don’t have colored lights. The men think it may have been a hovering helicopter.

“Other than that, I can only say it was a high-cost, secret government project,” MacDonald said, chuckling. He said he would keep an eye out for green or scaly pilots.

One retired Air Force lieutenant colonel wasn’t kidding around, though. Jerry Rolwes is the assistant Washington state director of the Mutual UFO Network, a national organization that investigates sightings.

He said he would like to see the videotape, made Thursday night by Karen Hazlett, who lives on Bowdish Road near Sprague.

Hazlett swears the object got bigger in the sky, as if it was coming toward her, and later retreated.

The tape shows a round, shimmery silver object twinkling in the night, with Hazlett’s 11-year-old daughter, Tara, yelling “Mom, it’s spinning!”

And 13-year old Tessa?

“I know it was real,” she said, her voice losing its waver and catching conviction. “And it scared me.”

, DataTimes