ARLINGTON — She might not call it a “close encounter,” but Arlington resident Madeline Gerwick recently had a brush with the unexplained.

Gerwick was pumping gas at the Smokey Point Safeway at around 10 p.m. on Saturday, June 6, when she spotted a succession of, for lack of a better term, unidentified flying objects.

“As I turned north, to walk behind my car, I saw several orange lights jump up into the sky very quickly, one after another,” Gerwick said. “Each one popped up within a second or less after the one before it. There were eleven in all, and the eleventh was a bit of a straggler.”

Having never seen anything like this before, Gerwick snapped some shots of the lights, which remained relatively low in the sky, just slightly above the horizon, for about 30 seconds.

The objects then turned suddenly to the east, and flew out of sight without making a sound.

“They had been heading south towards me, and I was slightly to the west of them,” Gerwick said. “I did consider the possibility that they could be Chinese lanterns, but they moved much too quickly, and with too much control, for that to be the case. There wasn’t any noticeable wind in the area at the time, and even with a strong wind, Chinese lanterns would have stayed around much longer.”

Gerwick described the lights as much brighter and bigger than any star, and much smaller than the moon. The lights never flashed, but simply stayed steady and moved across the sky.

Although she speculated that the lights could have launched from the Arlington Airport, Gerwick thought they also could have gone up into the air further north than that.

“The lights were bright enough to be seen from a good distance,” Gerwick said.