Coralville, Iowa, June 27, 2012 — A red-and-bluish object hovered over a house for two hours before departing northwest. YouTube video still accessible.
THINK ABOUTIT UFO|UAP SIGHTING REPORT
2012: UFO in Coralville, Iowa Sighting – Video
On the night of June 27, 2012, two witnesses in Coralville, Iowa — a suburb of Iowa City in Johnson County — watched a red-and-bluish object hover over a house for two hours. They filmed it. The YouTube video (embedded on this page) shows what it shows: a colored light in the night sky, hovering, for an extended duration. After two hours, it flew away heading northwest. The witnesses did not provide names, did not file with any reporting organization, and offered no description of the object beyond its color and behavior. What they did provide is a video — and unlike the Cedar Rapids case from the same summer, this one is still there.
Date: June 27, 2012
Sighting Time: Night (time not specified)
Day/Night: Night
Location: Coralville, Iowa (Johnson County — Iowa City metropolitan area)
Urban or Rural: Urban / Suburban
No. of Entity(‘s): None reported
Entity Type: N/A
Entity Description: N/A
Hynek Classification: CE-I (Close Encounter I) — Object hovering over a house, arguably within 500 feet vertically if the altitude estimate is taken at face value. Classification retained with caveat: no distance measurement confirmed.
Duration: Approximately 2 hours
No. of Object(s): 1
Height & Speed: Hovering over a house for 2 hours. Departed heading northwest.
Size of Object(s): Not estimated
Distance to Object(s): Not estimated (described as “hovering over the house”)
Shape of Object(s): Not described in detail
Color of Object(s): Red and bluish
Number of Witnesses: 2
Special Features/Characteristics: Hovered over a house for approximately 2 hours. Red and bluish coloration. Departed heading northwest. Video captured and uploaded to YouTube (still accessible as of archive rebuild).
Source: YouTube video upload (https://www.youtube.com/embed/0WkEuGbajTs)
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary/Description: On June 27, 2012, two witnesses in Coralville, Iowa filmed a red-and-bluish object hovering over a house for approximately two hours before it departed heading northwest. The footage was uploaded to YouTube. No structural details of the object were described. No names, reporting organization, or investigation are associated with the case.
Related Cases: 2012: Cedar Rapids, Iowa — Video | 2008: Altoona, Iowa | Iowa Sightings Archive
Detailed Report
The witness description is minimal: footage was taken on June 27, 2012 of an object in Coralville, Iowa. The object was hovering over a house for two hours before it flew away heading northwest. The object appeared red and bluish in color. Two witnesses observed the event. A YouTube video was uploaded documenting the sighting.
No additional narrative, witness background, or contextual information was provided. No reporting organization (MUFON, NUFORC, etc.) is credited. No investigation was conducted.
Researcher’s Notes
Two Hours of Red and Blue Over Coralville
- Source Assessment: This is an anonymous YouTube upload with a one-sentence description. The video exists — which is more than many cases can claim — but without analysis of the footage (stabilization, zoom, spectral evaluation), it constitutes documentation of an ambiguous light rather than evidence of an anomalous object. No witness names, no investigation, no reporting chain.
- Hynek Classification Note: The original page listed CE-I. The description “hovering over the house” could place the object within the 500-foot CE-I threshold if taken literally, but without a confirmed distance measurement, this is an assumption. The two-hour duration is unusual — most CE-I events last minutes, not hours. An object maintaining position over a fixed point for two hours at low altitude would be extraordinary; at high altitude, it could be a celestial body, a satellite in a favorable viewing angle, or an illuminated high-altitude balloon. CE-I is retained with the caveat that proximity is not independently confirmed.
- Conventional Candidates: A red-and-bluish light hovering for two hours on a summer night has straightforward conventional candidates: a bright star or planet (Vega, Arcturus, Mars, and Jupiter can all display red-blue scintillation when low on the horizon), an illuminated drone, or a tethered advertising light. The two-hour stationary duration is more consistent with a celestial source or a tethered/stationary object than with a powered craft, which would typically exhibit some observable movement during that timeframe. The northwest departure could represent the object actually moving, or the witnesses losing sight of a stationary source as atmospheric conditions or their viewing angle changed.
- The Iowa City Corridor 2012: This sighting and the Cedar Rapids sighting six weeks later (August 6, 2012) both occurred in the Iowa City–Cedar Rapids metropolitan corridor during the summer of 2012. Whether this represents coincidence, a local flap, or independent reports of common nocturnal stimuli (celestial objects, drones, military activity from the Iowa City Airport or Eastern Iowa Airport) cannot be determined from the available evidence.
The video is still up. That makes this case more verifiable than most anonymous submissions. But a colored light in the night sky, filmed on a consumer device, hovering for two hours, with no structural detail and no investigation, is not going to clear the bar for anything beyond Insufficient Data. The archive preserves it because it preserves everything with a video — and because two hours is a long time to watch something that isn’t there.
