Multiple large flashes of light (w/footage) + Orange/red orb (multiple witnesses)

Multiple large flashes of light (w/footage) + Orange/red orb (multiple witnesses)
Time: 24/01/2025 at around 19:30

Location: Cork, Ireland

Around approximately 19:20 - 19:40 on the 24th of January this year, myself and 1 other person witnessed multiple large flashes of light that resembled lightning strikes. The flashes of light were across a river on an adjacent body of land (as shown in the video), as-well as a dimly lit flying orange orb that flew past us following the river and out towards the ocean. Unfortunately the video didn't pick up the orb, to be honest with you, I'm not even 100% sure if both the cameras was fully facing the direction of the orb as it passed us due to us being so fixated on watching it pass us and the darkness around us making it difficult to record properly. You can clearly hear us mention seeing this object as it flew past us right after the second flash of light. I understand that not being able to see what we are talking about is frustrating, its just as frustrating for me because I know that we definitely saw something strange out there and I'm gonna sound crazy even just trying to say it to someone, so having a video of it would have been really handy. I’ll try my best to explain the orb in detail below.  
  
Anyway I'm gonna explain how this all happened, A family member informed us of strange flashing lights in the water that she saw from her balcony. Myself and the person with me decided to go for a walk by where we can see the ocean (shown in the video), when we got there we noticed multiple flashing lights out in the ocean and the horizon, we didn't think much of it as it didn't seem too out of the ordinary at the time, however after about 1 minute of standing there we saw a massive bright flash of light that lit up the whole sky around us, this flash was significantly larger than the ones in the video, there was no sound, no thunder and no bang. After that we decided to start recording with our phones in-case it happened again. We decided to walk further down the pier area to get to an area where there are less lights around us (can be seen in the full 7 minute unedited video), once we got to the end of the area, that's when we saw the first large flash that's shown in the video, around 30 seconds later was when the second flash occurred, as soon as the second flash dissipated both myself and the person with me noticed a lowly lit orange/reddish orb flying a couple of feet above the river and going out towards the ocean. This thing was practically eye level with us, it was kinda far away but there is no doubt in my mind that it was a physical object. I couldn’t even guess the size of this thing, it seemed perfectly spherical and it looked like a dim lava (like fire?) colour, it wasn’t very bright at all, it was actually kinda difficult to see it but the movement of it make it stick out, it didn’t move extremely fast but it was going at a steady pace, it stayed in a straight line until it got further out into the water at which point it turned and headed eastward out to the ocean.  
There were also lots of flashing/blinking lights in the sky around us but especially out in the water and near the horizon, some even moved horizontally back and forth, some of these blinking lights can be seen in the videos but its difficult to see. Unfortunately our phones did a shitty job detecting the lights, but as with most phone cameras the night/dark recording isn't great.  
  
The above video has been trimmed down to show the flashes in both normal time and slow motion, I applied some brightness adjustments to try and enhance the video and make it a-bit easier to see what’s happening, the impact of this seems to be marginal at best. The full unedited video is around 7 minutes long at which point I stop recording as my phone battery was running very low and I didn’t want the phone to die while recording as it could corrupt the file. I then started recording again right after stopping and that second video is roughly 4 minutes long. The second video doesn’t show any more of the bright flashes, but you can kinda see multiple flashing lights in the sky and just over the water. Again the footage isn’t good because of the darkness and it being recorded with a phone camera however I’ll still make those full raw video files available to download for anyone that is interested in checking them/ editing them to see if they can enhance it further. Also bear in mind that myself and the person with me can be heard in the video talking whilst all this is going on, we are audibly freaked out with what’s going on, we’ve never seen anything like this, so again apologies for the poor language.

Myself and the person that was with me have spoken about what we should do after this event, and we’ve decided to write up a nuforc report and follow up with this post on here for this community to try and figure out what occurred. We want to try and maintain anonymity as best as possible, so I apologize in advance if there are any questions I can’t answer.

Adding this: as I was writing up this post I’ve found a website that displays where lightning hits over a specified period of time, I’ve entered the dates and times of this event and the map shows that there zero lightning strikes in the area at that time. The website is here if anyone would like to check it out for themselves. [https://www.lightningmaps.org/blitzortung/europe/index.php?bo\_page=archive&bo\_map=uk&lang=en&bo\_year=2025&bo\_month=01&bo\_day=24&bo\_hour\_from=17&bo\_hour\_range=5&bo\_animation=1#google\_vignette](https://www.lightningmaps.org/blitzortung/europe/index.php?bo_page=archive&bo_map=uk&lang=en&bo_year=2025&bo_month=01&bo_day=24&bo_hour_from=17&bo_hour_range=5&bo_animation=1#google_vignette)  
The link above shows lightning strikes between 17:00 to 22:00 on the 24th of January. The lights in the video occurred at approximately 19:33 (based on the time associated with the video file (19:30) and adding on the 3 minutes for the time it took for the flash to appear in the video (19:33), the second flash happened around 30 seconds later, so let’s say 19:34.  
I'm not 100% sure of the accuracy of that website so I’m not saying for definite that it isn’t lighting strikes but it certainly makes things more interesting. I’ve also added a clip of that website to the video above for easier viewing.  
  
Tldr: We saw multiple large bright flashes of light that lit up the sky, and also an orange/red lava sphere fly in front of us and out into the ocean, and also saw roughly between 15-20 (rough guess) flashing/blinking lights both in the sky and on the water.