Vidhas hunters' vehicle stall under blue and red lights

Elbasan County, central Albania. The commune of Papër lay beyond the city, its villages running toward the border with Peqin district. One of them was Vidhas. In 2015 Papër was folded into Elbasan municipality. In December 2008 Vidhas was the destination of four hunters from Elbasan.

The story is dated 24 December 2008. Around 20:30 the four men set off for Vidhas. After leaving the commune centre they took a forest road. About 15 km along it, the cabin of their off-road vehicle was jolted from above. The engine stalled.

Then the light. Muharrem Kaçuli, the only witness ever named, described it plainly. "A strong light-blue light and a vertical red light blinded us." He reached for the one comparison he had. "For a moment it seemed to me as if police cars were chasing us from behind."

A 25-year-old in the group wanted to shoot at the glowing object with his hunting gun. His father would not let him. The hunters had seen something extraordinary, the later accounts say. They fled in fear.

Four hunters, all from Elbasan, and only Kaçuli is named. English Wikipedia says the young man with the gun was his own son. The Albanian reprints speak only of "a 25-year-old" and "his father". The other two remain anonymous. No ages, jobs or follow-up interviews were ever published.

Every telling traces back to a single newspaper item from December 2008 that has not been found. Albanian Wikipedia credits a copy to the newspaper Standard. Top Channel reprinted the story on 22 October 2013 under the heading "Elbasan, 24 Dhjetor 2008", placing the scene about 30 km from the city. Gazeta Tema ran it in 2016, Gazeta Dita in April 2026. Vision Times retold it in July 2026 as "a blue light followed by a vertical beam of red light".

The date itself wavers. The same Top Channel text says the encounter came on the Thursday evening before Christmas 2008. But 24 December 2008 was a Wednesday. The heading may be a dateline, the day the story was filed rather than the day it happened. There was no official inquiry. Albanian media noted that the country had no centre for observing the sky or anomalous phenomena. No photograph, video, radar return or physical trace was reported.

No published source offers one, and nobody has claimed a hoax. Kaçuli's own words invite a guess. Blue and red light, a vertical bar, the feeling of something coming up from behind. That sounds like an emergency light bar. A low helicopter or aircraft with red anti-collision lights is another possibility, and an engine can simply stall on a rough forest road in December. None of these ideas has ever been tested against the original report.

The Vidhas hunters live on in Albanian roundups of UFOs in Albania. They sit beside the 1993 crowd sighting at Cërrik, also in Elbasan County, the 2007 coast guard report from the Seman coast and the Tirana video of 2010. It is a small case. Four men, a dead engine, two colours of light in a dark forest. And one father who would not let the young man shoot.