Three Orange Orbs Over Lake Guntersville

Video: “Glowing red orb over Guntersville, Alabama July 2026”, uploaded by UFO Sightings Daily on 7 August 2026 at 15:00 PDT (18:00 ET); 27 seconds. The description credits NUFORC. Embedded, not rehosted.

Guntersville Lake seen from the north, Guntersville, Alabama, by day, July 2026. Generic place image, not the lights. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What happened

On the evening of Friday 31 July 2026, a single witness in Guntersville, a lake town of about 9,000 people in north Alabama, watched three orange lights cross the sky. The witness filed a report with the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) the next afternoon, and NUFORC posted it on 3 August as sighting 199826.

The report is short and specific. The witness saw “orbs of orange steady light moving southwest toward northeast”, three of them, at different distances from one another, over five to ten minutes. One moved fast, then slowed abruptly, and the lights changed course slightly while keeping the same general heading. The witness heard nothing: “Absolutely zero noise detected with passing of orbs.” The sighting ended when the lights passed behind trees.

On 7 August the UFO Sightings Daily blog and its YouTube channel published a 27-second clip credited to NUFORC. On 27 August Coast to Coast AM picked the story up, describing three orange balls of light moving at “various speeds” and putting the sighting at “around 6 PM”. That time is where the confusion starts.

Timeline

• 31 Jul 2026, 20:27 CDT (approximate): the sighting, per the NUFORC report. Sunset in Guntersville that evening was at 19:47 CDT and civil twilight ended at about 20:15, by our own calculation with the PyEphem library.
• 1 Aug 2026, 18:18 PDT: the witness files the report with NUFORC.
• 3 Aug 2026: NUFORC posts sighting 199826 with the explanation “Chinese Lantern – Probable”.
• 7 Aug 2026, 15:00 PDT: UFO Sightings Daily uploads the 27-second clip to YouTube and blogs about it.
• 18 Aug 2026: The UAP Trail writes the case up as a “source lead”.
• 27 Aug 2026: Coast to Coast AM shares the footage.
• 4 Nov 2026: the report’s search-index text, the archived grading tiers and the video page were last checked.

What believers claim

The most elaborate claim comes from the UFO Sightings Daily blog post. Its author, Scott C. Waring, argued that because the town is small and wooded, “I would say they actually came from an alien base underground in the area.” He added that multiple UFOs appear together when preparing a long-distance jump. Neither claim rests on anything in the witness report.

The more modest version, repeated on social media, is that silent lights changing speed can’t be aircraft. That part deserves a fair hearing, and it is where the research went.

What the research found

NUFORC’s own reviewers already offered an answer. The report page lists “Explanation: Chinese Lantern – Probable”. NUFORC grades reports in tiers, and its databank page says Tier 4 covers “Reports we feel are explainable by human or natural phenomenon”, rated possible, probable or certain. The orange colour, steady glow, silence and loose formation all match how sky lanterns look from the ground.