The Colour Changing Light With a Dark Centre Over Spring Hill, Tennessee (12 September 2026)
A structured sighting report filed from a Tennessee parking lot on the night of 12 September 2026 describes a multicoloured flashing light with a dark centre that hung in the northeast for fifteen minutes in front of four witnesses. The coordinates in the filing, an ephemeris for that exact moment and the footage itself account for every feature of it.
What did witnesses see at Spring Hill?
The report was filed through a structured sighting form and posted to Reddit by an automated account. Its own fields carry more than enough information to test it.
The filing gives the time as 12 September 2026 at 11:15 PM CDT and the observer as facing northeast. It records one object, shape given as changing, closest distance as a few miles, apparent size at arm's length as a pea, movement as floating around, duration as 15 minutes and the number of witnesses as four. The capture device is listed as a Galaxy S25 Ultra. Against the standard observables the reporter answered no to wings, no to rotors, no to an exhaust plume and no to noise, and yes to sudden extreme acceleration, yes to extreme speed with no signatures, yes to hard to observe clearly and yes to flight without visible means of lift. Asked why it could not be a common object, the reporter wrote, keeping their own spelling, "You tell me, sometimes its there and sometimes it's not. But I cant find anything in fight radar".
The headline on the Reddit post places the event in Rochester, New York. The filing's own location data does not. The map pin attached to the report resolves to 35.726055, -86.882935, and when those coordinates are put to the United States Census Bureau geocoder they return Spring Hill city, Maury County, Tennessee, in census tract 102.04. The time zone stated in the filing is CDT, which is Tennessee's zone and is not New York's. Two independent fields of the report therefore agree with each other and disagree with its own headline, so this archive places the event in Tennessee and notes the discrepancy rather than repeating the headline.
The footage matters here more than most, because the archive copy and the Reddit copy are not the same thing. The original quality file attached to the report runs 173 seconds at 1920 by 1080 in HEVC at roughly 20 megabits per second. The copy that circulated on Reddit is a 48 second re-encode, so about seventy percent of the recording never reached the audience that commented on it. The clip opens wide on a lit apartment block, a row of parked cars and trees, with a bright security lamp burning on the gable end, then tilts up and goes to extreme digital zoom on a small light in the sky and stays there.
More footage and images of this sighting
What is the official explanation?
No official body has commented on this sighting and no agency narrative exists. There is no police report, no airport statement and no local news coverage of it.
The one official check the reporter describes making is a flight tracking check, and their result is correct. Nothing in this case is an aircraft, so an absence from flight radar is the expected result rather than an anomaly, and it does not narrow the field in the way the filing implies.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The report was filed by the Reddit user FrugalFuckery, verified through a one time link from their own account, and posted on their behalf by the automated reporting account. The account of the sighting begins with the four of them walking in the parking lot.
The thread drew the two comments that this archive ended up testing. One reader argued that pointing a phone sky map at the object should settle it immediately, on the grounds that a star, planet or moon would be identified on the spot. Another stated the conclusion directly, writing that the colour shifting is atmospheric scintillation and the dark centre a camera artifact. Both of those are claims rather than demonstrations, and neither commenter showed any working, so the archive treated them as hypotheses to be checked against the filing's own coordinates and timestamp rather than as answers.
Is the Colour Changing Light With a Dark Centre Over Spring Hill, Tennessee (12 September 2026) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, how this could be entirely ordinary.
The filing is unusually testable because it carries an exact time, an exact coordinate and a stated viewing direction, so the sky at that moment can simply be reconstructed. 11:15 PM CDT on 12 September 2026 is 04:15 UTC on 13 September 2026. Queried for that instant at 35.726055, -86.882935, the JPL Horizons ephemeris service puts Jupiter at 36.9 degrees below the horizon, Venus at 34.8 below, Mars at 22.4 below and the Moon at 43.1 below. All four are down. Saturn is the only planet above the horizon, at an altitude of 37.7 degrees and an azimuth of 119.0 degrees, which is east southeast and roughly 77 degrees away from the direction the reporter says they were facing. The Sun is 45.4 degrees below the horizon, so the sky is fully dark.
That leaves the bright stars, and there the sky is emphatic. Computed for the same instant and place, Capella sits at azimuth 42.0 degrees and altitude 13.1 degrees. Azimuth 42 is the northeast, which is exactly where the reporter says they were looking, and an altitude of 13 degrees is low. Capella is the sixth brightest star in the night sky at visual magnitude 0.08, a value confirmed here against the SIMBAD astronomical database along with its coordinates. Every other candidate is excluded by the same calculation: Vega is at azimuth 290 and altitude 51, Deneb at azimuth 310 and altitude 73, both high in the opposite half of the sky, Arcturus is 7.7 degrees below the horizon, and Aldebaran, though roughly in the right direction at azimuth 71, is only 1.8 degrees up and more than two magnitudes fainter. One bright object was in the reported direction, and it was Capella.
What Capella does at that altitude is the rest of the case. At 13 degrees above the horizon its light crosses roughly four times the thickness of atmosphere it would at the zenith, and chromatic scintillation, the rapid splitting of a point source into flashes of separate colours, is at its most violent in exactly that band. The detail strip published with this case tracks the object across eight samples at one and a half second intervals, following the brightest point in each frame rather than a fixed crop, and it cycles through green, magenta, orange white, magenta again, green, cream, yellow and green white inside twelve seconds. That is the behaviour of a low bright star, and it is why Capella is the single most commonly reported colour changing light in the northern hemisphere.
The dark centre has an equally plain cause and the hero image shows it. A phone at the far end of its digital zoom cannot bring a point source to focus, so it renders the point as a defocused disc that carries the shape of the optics and the sensor's processing rather than any shape belonging to the object, commonly with a squared off outline and a darker middle. In the same clip, at the same settings a few seconds earlier, the security lamp on the apartment gable renders as a clean sharp light because it is close, large and within focus range. The witness described the artifact accurately. They simply attributed it to the object.
The remaining reported features follow from the same two facts. Sometimes it is there and sometimes it is not, the reporter wrote, and cloud is not the answer: the nearest automated reporting station, at Maury County Regional Airport about 33 kilometres to the southwest, reported CLR with 10 statute miles of visibility right through the window, at 02:50, 03:55, 04:50 and 05:50 UTC. Under a clear sky the intermittency is the camera hunting for focus and exposure on a faint point, which the footage shows it doing repeatedly. Floating around, over fifteen minutes, describes a star that has moved less than four degrees of sky in that time, which is imperceptible in a handheld zoomed frame. The frame to frame displacement measured across the tracked samples is a drift of roughly two hundred pixels in six seconds in a consistent direction, which is hand shake on a zoomed phone rather than motion in the sky. The two observables answered yes for acceleration and speed are, on a maximally zoomed handheld phone, properties of the photographer.
Pass two, if it is not Capella.
The honest limit is that this archive can only test what the camera recorded, and four people were standing there. A witness may have seen something with their own eyes that the phone never captured, and nothing here establishes otherwise. But that possibility has to be weighed against the fact that every single feature the filing reports is independently accounted for: the direction matches Capella, the colour cycling matches low altitude scintillation, the dark centre matches a defocused point source on the same clip that shows an in focus lamp, the intermittency matches autofocus hunting under a sky the weather service recorded as clear, and the fifteen minute hover matches an object that is effectively fixed. Nothing is left over that needs explaining.
This case is tiered Strongly Disputed and deliberately not Discredited. The report is detailed, the reporter identified themselves, the footage is genuine and unaltered, and they did check what they knew how to check. A misidentification made in good faith is not a hoax, and this archive reserves its harshest tier for imagery or claims demonstrated to be fabricated.
Sources
- www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1wfdcb7/multicolored_flashing_light_with_dark_center/
- ufosighting.report/sighting/12975/multicolored-flashing-light-with-dark-center-floated-in-plac
- ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/
- simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=alf+Aur
- geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/
- mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/request/download.phtml?network=TN_ASOS
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United States
