On a late November evening in Beaverton, Oregon, my two friends and I found ourselves staring eastward over the lake near Progress Ridge, close to the Beaverton/Tigard border. Above the West Hills, where radio towers punctuate the skyline, low clouds hovered—low enough to accentuate the scene but not obscure the towers themselves. That night, something extraordinary unfolded in the sky.
From within the cloud cover, an immense green, disc-shaped light began to rotate slowly counter-clockwise. The motion felt deliberate and uncanny, the disc aligned parallel to the ground as it completed about a quarter turn before vanishing as suddenly as it had appeared. But within seconds, the spectacle escalated: the same disc shape reemerged, this time flashing a rapid sequence of yellow, orange, and red light. The colors shifted quickly, reminiscent of a handheld electronic game like “Simon Says,” yet evoked a haunting, almost living presence in the sky.
This dazzling display repeated moments later — a brief reprise of the rotating disc, this time slightly shorter in duration, followed by a solitary yellow hue flickering alone. Throughout the event, the massive shape seemed perfectly concealed within the ambient glow of city lights illuminating the cloud layer above downtown Portland, distinct and unsettlingly separate.
Adding to the enigma, several aircraft clustered unusually close by, lingering longer and flying in close formation unlike typical civilian patterns. Although not sounding like military jets we often see overhead, their behavior was enigmatic, as if accompanying or chasing the glowing disc in the sky.
Our threefold reaction was immediate and visceral—we grabbed each other’s sleeves, stepping back with a profound sense of dread and unease. There was an instinctive awareness, a primal fear as if unseen eyes were watching from the shadowed woods. It’s difficult to convey without sound dramatic, but this sensation was genuine and undeniable.
The entire phenomenon lasted just about 60 seconds, a fleeting encounter with something immense, mysterious, and possibly beyond our understanding. After the second light show, the lights vanished, yet the cloud cover seemed persistently brighter, as if the sky itself held onto the secret a little longer.
That night in Beaverton, Oregon, the sky was not just a veil of clouds—it was a stage for the extraordinary. These massive green rotating disc lights over Portland marked a chilling chapter in our ongoing wonder of the unexplained, forever etched in our memories, and inviting those who gaze upward to ponder the mysteries beyond.