The Singular Fortean Society was contacted recently 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.

Taylor was driving on Zion Church Road near Hickory, North Carolina, at approximately 8 p.m., when an orange ball of light crossed quickly in front of him.

"Out of the blue, I’m driving down the road and this orange ball of light whizzes across my windshield, like an inch away," he told investigator Tobias Wayland in an interview. "I’m doing 55 mph just zooming down the road and this orange ball of light just whizzes right by me."

Taylor pulled his vehicle over next to an empty field and exited, only to find a dozen more of the luminescent orbs grouped together floating nearby.

Some were floating at eye level, he said, while others were a little higher than that, but they were close enough where Taylor thought that if he had reached out, he could have almost touched one.

"I get out of my car and look up and there’s like a dozen of these orange balls of light. Some of them were like five feet away, ten feet away, but they’re all right there just hanging out," he said.

Each light would grow brighter or dimmer seemingly at random, while some hovered and others moved gracefully through the air.

"It was like you knew they were alive because of the pattern of the lights; similar to a heartbeat but it wasn’t a repetitive thing," Taylor said. "[Their movements were] the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, really graceful, like a butterfly. Very smooth. It seemed like they could have gone any speed they wanted."

As Taylor examined the orbs, he noticed that their insides "looked almost like the guts inside of a lightbulb."

"It's not light, it was some kind of structure," he explained.

Or so he thought.

"But right when I thought that it dimmed out where I could see it was light, there was no substance there," Taylor said. "There was no structure; they would totally disappear and come right back."

He was at a total loss as to what the objects could be.

"I’m sitting there looking at these things, and, in my mind, I’m going through the rational things they could be. They’re not lanterns, they’re not drones, they were intelligent. Each one had its own personality almost," said Taylor.

The awestruck man watched the orange orbs for several minutes, until they gathered together and left.

"The only time I noticed a pattern was when they left," he said. "They all flew into the same general area and flew away in a line. I watched them until they blinked out. They blinked out and there was nothing there."

Taylor described the encounter as a strange, yet friendly, experience.

"It was really bizarre. There was a dreamlike quality to the experience, but I was still conscious and aware. It was really wild," he said. "When I got out of the car and they were right there it was almost like they were attracted to me; like they picked up on me and were like, 'Here’s us, here’s what we are.' To me it was friendly, like a friendly interaction. I know it’s so weird to say interaction, but to me it felt that way."

When asked why he didn't attempt to record the experience, Taylor responded that it didn't feel right to try and do so at the time.

"I still didn’t have a personal cellphone at that point. I had a work cellphone with a really crappy camera in it and I actually had my hand on it while this was going on and I swear it’s the weirdest thing in the world, but I felt it would be rude. I didn’t want to ruin the interaction," he said. "I remember thinking, 'I could try to get a picture but it’s probably not going to come out good anyway, so I’m not even going to bother.'"

However, after the event, Taylor noticed that a nearby church appeared to have ended its Christmas Eve service and the congregation was beginning to exit into the church’s parking lot.

“After this happened, I was just standing there, shocked, and I could see over at the church, which was maybe a quarter mile away, I could see these people coming out of the church. There were maybe four or five of them," he said. "I was just so in awe that I left there and pulled into the church and I asked these people, 'Did you see that?'”

The congregants’ reactions to Taylor’s story were mixed.

"One guy was a real smartass and said, 'Yeah, it was Santa and his reindeer,' or something like that," Taylor said. "But there was a woman in the group who was really interested. She asked me, 'What did they look like?' I still think about that. Why I did that. And I don’t know, it was just such an intense experience. I wish I could have shared it with somebody."

It’s possible that Taylor actually did share the experience with other travelers that night, at least in some small way.

"Another funny thing, I was so focused on these lights, but I was aware that there were a couple cars that had gone by me on the side of the road with these things," he said. "And I thought in my head, 'How can you guys not see this?' I guess they didn’t see it or if they saw it, they just kept driving."

The next day, on Christmas, Taylor woke up to his eyes almost swollen shut.

"My eyes were burning and red, and they were like that for two or three days," he said.

After that, Taylor didn't think about the experience much for a few years, before deciding to look into it further.

When he did, he discovered that there had been a major UFO flap on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 2014.

According to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), dozens of UFOs were reported on those two days, many of which bear an uncanny resemblance to the orange orbs described by Taylor.

Since then, Taylor has been unable to forget about what happened to him.

"I went back to that area a few times," he said. "I don’t know what I’m expecting to find. I’ve often wondered if there’s anything else that’s happened out there."

As for his own experience, “It was mind-blowing,” he said.

 

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