Years ago I was stargazing with my binoculars and as I was randomly just scanning around when I saw an evenly spaced parade of three gray shapes that looked exactly like the way an oil painting will simplify distant sea gulls in flight by joining two half-elipses to resemble a flattened lower case "m." Anyway - these gull-wing shapes were definitely gliding left-to-right and descending in elevation through the background stars, they never changed their spacing, and in the course of about five seconds they faded from view. I'd say they traversed about 10 degrees of sky before disappearing. It was the strangest, most Twilight Zone moment I'd ever had under the night sky. I wrote down my description, the constellation in which it first appeared (Capricorn) date/time, etc., and told myself that while what I'd just seen was very weird, I wasn't going to leap to conclusions. The mystery remained as "just one of those weird things I've seen" for about five years and then one day while studying up on phenomena associated with meteor showers I found an article dealing with persistent meteor trains, and included photos of exactly what I'd seen. Moral of the story: The sky is full of surprises, none of which involve aliens. ________________________________________ From: Utah-Astronomy <utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com> on behalf of Joe Bauman via Utah-Astronomy <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Friday, October 16, 2015 10:24 PM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Balloon sighting? I had such an experience once and thought it must be a UFO. I got a video camera and watched it a long time until it sort of faded out -- this was around sunset. When I enlarged the view I saw that it was definitely an airplane that was reflecting the sun. It didn't seem to be moving much because it was flying directly away from me. Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 16, 2015, at 3:59 PM, Fred Orrell <forrell@es.com> wrote:
I saw something in the sky last night about 6:50 PM on October 15, 2015. It wasn't quite dark yet and the skies were mostly clear.
I was sitting in the backyard swing at my house in Sandy, Utah and happened to look up about 80 degrees in elevation and toward the East. A white colored "star" appeared about as bright as Venus or the ISS would be at this time of day, yet Jupiter, Mars, and Venus are only visible in the early morning this month. None of the other planets ever appear this bright.
I was sitting in the swing and used the support bar as a reference to verify it wasn't moving, at least not very fast if it was moving. I watched it for several minutes and then it started fading in brightness until it disappeared over about a one minute period. I really wished that I had my binoculars with me.
A geostationary satellite would never appear that bright and an Iridium satellite (which I have seen many) would have moved. Other than calling it a UFO, the only thing I can imagine is that I witnessed a high altitude balloon. If so, it either dropped into Earth's shadow causing it to dim, or it burst. Anyone know how to find out about high altitude balloons over Utah?
Another wild possibility is that it could have been a gamma ray burst, which I believe I witnessed years ago with several other people.
Fred Orrell
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