These stories always seem to be told by the strange ones, so I guess I am admitting to being somewhat off-center...which is okay because I work at Bookmans.

I am the janitor at the Flagstaff location, which means I go to work early. Last week I was taking some bags of trash out to the dumpster before the store opened. On the way down the ramp, my attention was drawn to the sky over the south campus of NAU. I looked up and there, hovering motionless for all the city to see, was an orb about the size of a small car and as clear as glass. Judging by nearby buildings I'd estimate it was around 15 floors up...or somewhere around 150 feet. It just sat there in the morning sun like it was pinned to the sky.

As for me this is not nearly the first time I've seen such a spectacle. Not even close. I've honestly seen and photographed/filmed these orbs many times over many years in many states across the country (there was one downtown last summer that hovered for over five hours). I've talked a lot about them but I've never committed them to writing for the public until now.

I had mentioned the phenomenon to my co-worker Angi a couple weeks before and she'd commented that she would like to "see something weird like that" with her own eyes. So of course that morning I went into her office and told her there was an orb hovering outside. She came right out. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the morning light but she saw it. We watched it for a while and talked about how truly bizarre it was. I got my little Canon digital camera out and pushed its meager zoom to full capacity, but the distance and the brightness were screwing with the focus. All I could get with it was a white fuzzy dot. Then Angi said, "Try the store camera!" (Yes, I used company property for something extracurricular.) The store camera is a superhero compared to mine; it has a 48x zoom. I started knocking off picture after picture of the orb at full zoom, then I pulled back to include some foreground objects for size and distance reference. The sunlight was playing tricks with the auto focus (even though it's fancy it doesn't have manual focus...typical digital crap) and the camera kept trying to compensate for the brightness of the sun on the object, but I managed to get six really good shots of it.

Without the story as an accompaniment the images would be very unremarkable. It might be a drop of water on glass. It might be a soap bubble floating around. But I will swear on whatever holy book or relic you put in front of me that the object in the photos was bigger than me and four or five blocks away. It was clear, it didn't react to wind (it seemed magnetically stuck in place), and it was most definitely not a simple balloon.

Then, as it usually happens when at work, duty called! I had to go back inside to do my job. I made a couple excuses to peek out the back door again over the next hour. The orb stayed visible until a hazy "cloud layer" eventually obscured everything. All in all, three of the employees saw it and most of the others have seen the photos.

I don't make any claims as to what it was, only to what it wasn't. I have seen objects like this one do some very remarkable things. I unsuccessfully chased one with a friend; we were roaring down the interstate going 85-90 mph and couldn't catch up to it. I might add we were driving against the wind. Naysayers would probably write these pictures off as some kind of childish hoax, as if I've got nothing better to do with my time. I believe that even the naysayers will come to realize there's a lot more going on in the world than our modern "postcard-reality" can answer to.

One co-worker asked me, "Doesn't stuff like that freak you out?" I told him no, that these orbs or spheres have not been sufficiently explained. Are they aircraft? Are they extraterrestrial? Are they living creatures? They certainly move (when they actually do) as if they are intelligently controlled. That's the only thing I'm certain of. They are not "trash blowing in the wind" or "Venus refracted by moisture in the air" or any of the other fear-based rationalizations I've heard countless times. I'm sure the first wheel scared the hell out of a bunch of monkeys, but the brave ones figured out what to do with it. No, I am not afraid of the unknown. There's no reason to be - it's unknown!