The handheld video is that started it all is shaky. The image almost beyond the capabilities of the camera.

Heather Morrison of McGill, Nevada says what we're able to see on the video she took isn't close to what she and her husband saw. A conclusion you can reach just listening to their excited reaction.

The Morrisons witnessed those lights hanging in the dark sky, blinking on and off one night in early October in a remote spot in White Pine County's Steptoe Valley 60 miles north of Ely at a highway intersection called Lages Junction.

They saw other motorist pulling over to watch that night.

"For a 5 mile radius," she says. "People getting out and looking. There were a lot of people who saw it."

Only they came forward to tell their story, but the man who runs a service station and RV park at this lonely site, says they apparently weren't alone.

"I've had several that came into the store and said they've seen them when they were driving through," says Charles Gledhill.

Gledhill has operated this highway rest stop for 40 years. He says he hasn't seen these lights himself, but some of his neighbors have.

One of them, seventeen year old Mike Bertrand didn't see or hear anything October 2nd, but one night in early December he stepped outside.

"All of a sudden this light just came up. Big. Green and orange. Wham. Right there. And then all of a sudden it just disappeared."

It wasn't the first time Bertrand has seen something he couldn't explain. Every June he says other lights are seen over a summit north of Lages.
Orange lights stacked vertically the sky, then blinking off.

In November a standing room only crowd showed up at an Ely hotel to hear a presentation by Mark Easter, a field investigator for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network.

Some lingered to tell their own stories, including sightings by mine workers just west of town a few nights after the sightings at Lages Junction.

Sightings here have continued as well.

"We've got a couple of new witnesses describing pretty much the same thing," says Easter. "So as far as I'm concerned this is an ongo9ing investigation. It's not done."

One of those witnesses is lifelong White Pine County resident Mary Sorenson, who says she often takes her telescope out on clear winter nights beyond the lights of her home in Ruth.

"One night I was out there and this thing went overhead and I didn't pay much attention. And it stopped and changed direction. It was too high to be a helicopter, so I just went in the house," she says with a chuckle. "

"I didn't know what it was. The government might have been testing something. I don't know, but I figured I didn't want to witness it, so I went in the house."

If Sorenson and others are less unnerved than one might expect, it's because people out here say it's not uncommon to see strange things in the night time sky.

Ely sits midway between two possible terrestrial sources for these sightings. The Nellis Air Force Range and Area 51 to the south, and the Utah Test and Training Range used by Hill Air Force Base to the north.

There's real history behind the assumption that some of these sightings at least originate there.

Kent Harper, editor of the Ely Times says years ago the town was buzzed by a strange looking craft which has by now become familiar. "

For years people saw deltas flying over Ely before the Air Froce admitted the stealth fighter existed."

Neither the stealth fighter nor any other known aircraft look like or can execute the kind of silent manuevers some witnesses are reporting and so people here are left to draw their own conclusions.

If history is any guide, their speculations will continue.

"i'm not so sure if UFO's want to visit Nevada or not," says Sorenson, "but we see stuff in the sky all the time. What it is we don't know. You live here long enough, you see something."