24-year-old Lauren Nevil of Farmington, New York, contacted the Singular Fortean Society earlier this month to report a sighting of strange, white aerial lights seen during a power outage last November.
The outage came as a result of a stormfront with high winds which knocked out power for thousands of residents in western New York on November 15th, 2020.
In an interview with investigator Tobias Wayland, Nevil said she was preparing to go to bed that evening when her mother alerted her to something strange happening outside.
“I remember specifically because I was trying to get to sleep, and it was a windy night, and all the power went out. I live in a townhouse complex. I remember the power going out and my mom came upstairs [calling my name]. I said, ‘What? I’m trying to go to sleep because I have to get up for work the next morning.’ She said, ‘Look outside!’ She was freaking out,” said Nevil.
“I looked out my bedroom window, facing towards the parking lot, and I saw all of these strange lights in the sky,” she continued. “My mom was flipping out, and I was like ‘What is going on?’ She called my sister into my room, and we could see everything because there was no light pollution, so it was clear. It was a clear sky. We didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t know if it was satellites. My sister counted 10 to 15 lights. I’m not sure how long it lasted, maybe about 10 to 15 minutes.”
Historical weather data for that evening shows that at the time of the sighting, which Nevil believed took place between 10 and 10:30 p.m., the sky over Farmington was mostly cloudy, meaning that while a small portion of the sky might have been visible, it would have been mostly obscured.
“It was just a bunch [of lights] all clustered together,” she explained. “They were bright, [and] they were just sitting there. I think the oddest thing was that they were clustered together in a group—not in any sort of formation. It was very strange.”
Weather conditions that evening make it likely that the lights were below the cloud cover, given Nevil’s description of events.
“This wasn’t like any star or anything,” she said of the lights.
After the three women spent “10 to 15 minutes” observing the stationary lights, they “all just kind of disappeared,” said Nevil.
“[The lights disappeared] kind of like one at a time,” she said.
Nevil told Wayland that she had done some research of her own prior to contacting the Singular Fortean Society.
“I’ve looked up websites where people report UFOs, and in the area that I live people have seen stuff, although that’s the first time I’ve ever really seen anything,” she said. “I’m kind of freaked out.”
Wayland found five reported sightings from Farmington in the case files of the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).
NUFORC’s files also showed that the city of Rochester, only 20 miles northwest of Farmington and located directly adjacent to Lake Ontario, has had many dozens of reported UFO sightings going back decades.
This sighting isn’t the only unusual encounter had by Nevil, who said she and her sister have also experienced a string of nighttime visitations by unknown entities.
“When we used to live in our old house, before we moved, my sister and I would sometimes feel like someone was sitting on our bed, like the pressure. It felt like someone was sitting there. That happened every once in a while,” she said. “Our beds would shake, too. We don’t know what that was.”
Her sister, said Nevil, had even woken up to find “someone was standing over her, leaning over to look at her,” although “that hasn’t happened in a long time.”
Nevil said that, despite having been in bed when she experienced the paranormal events, she was sure that she was “fully awake” at the times they occurred.