Having just blogged about my "ghost" experience some weeks back (see previous post), here I go branding myself a true goofball.
So be it.
This is a column I've written for the paper I edit on Shelter Island, NY. Perhaps there are Goodreads followers who can shed light on what I saw:

There’s a story I’d love to do for the Reporter but I can’t find a way to get ahold of it. I need a number of responsible, respectable people to interview who’ve seen the phenomenon I want to write about. I also need some authoritative official sources who will at least acknowledge there’s something curious and — as far as I know — unexplained going on in the night skies.
I haven’t had a lot of time to work on the story; maybe if I had more, I could put something together. I do have a shortcut option: this column. At the risk of branding myself a nut, I can lay out the facts as I know them and see if anyone else out there knows of what I write.
With a big Labor Day weekend issue looming and the need to get all its many chores accomplished, including this column, I’m going to throw caution to the wind and let the ink (or pixels) flow.
Has anyone on Shelter Island, looking toward the north on a summer night from Crescent Beach or other verges or high points on the northern half of the Island, seen some very strange patterns of orange lights moving across the sky in a way that airplanes, helicopters, balloons, dirigibles and Chinese lanterns do not move?
Has anyone anywhere else seen them?
You can see what I’m talking about by Googling “orange lights in the sky over Connecticut.” That will take you to videos posted on YouTube not only from Connecticut but all over the world from 2012 and back several years that capture exactly what I’ve seen on two occasions.
The first time I was at a dinner party one night last summer at a house on the bluff overlooking Long Beach, in Bay Haven, a couple of miles south of South Ferry. Standing on the back deck looking northward at the lovely moonless night, I noticed a small but blobby orange light moving from left to right quite low, far out beyond Jessups Neck.
I’m a pilot so I was interested. I guessed it was an Air National Guard C-130 on some kind of drill out over the Sound, with some sort of search and rescue lamp ablaze. I could see no flashing aviation lights; I could hear no engines. I figured it was too far away.
It got a little weird when the light began climbing steeply as it moved east at an angle no C-130 is capable of. At the high point of its climb, it slowed down, arced northward and disappeared.
“Huh,” I thought. “What was that?”
When the same light reappeared far off to the west again, low in the sky beyond Jessups Neck, I really got curious — especially when another light just like the first one appeared behind it, following the same remarkable upward path to the east and arcing away before disappearing.
I called over a neighbor who happened to be at the same party — a former Nassau County cop who is no pushover for flakey UFO stories — and he watched with me as the number of orange lights increased to more than a dozen, flying the same familiar circuit in trail at first, but now with some bunching together into little evolving formations.
This performance last about five or six minutes before, one by one, each light disappeared as usual at the top of the climb but never reappeared. We waited but there were no more orange lights popping into view out to the west beyond Jessups.
That night I Googled “orange lights in the sky over Connecticut” and discovered other people had seen the same kinds of lights elsewhere.
The second time I saw the weird light — this time there was only one — came this summer. My wife and I were having dinner with friends in North Sea (Town of Southampton), at a house near the shore of Wooley Pond. We had been drawn out of the house by the sound of fireworks. It was a dark moonless night, lit up by rockets launched from a private party across the pond. After the last rocket went off and we watched its chrysanthemum glow fade away, we noticed that one orange ember had failed to burn out. It seemed to be traveling toward us.
It was so odd that our friends noticed it without coaching from me. “What the hell is that?” our friend Adam said.
By then we could see it hadn’t been an ember from the fireworks but a little blob of orange light that must have been passing west to east, almost straight up, just as the last rocket was fired. As it tracked across the sky, at an elevation much higher than the lights I’d seen the summer before, it seemed to slow down, speed up, and make a couple of 90-degree turns.
I couldn’t tell if it was just above the treetops or far, far up at high altitude. It made no sound, it had no flashing lights or red, white and green navigation lights.
Just passing its zenith in the sky over our heads, it disappeared.
Who else out there has seen these lights? Does someone know for a fact what they are? There’s an answer. I’d like to find it.
Let me know at pboody@timesreview.com. Maybe with a little feedback, I can put a story together.