Occurred: 2000-12-16 19:00 Local
Reported: 2000-12-17 00:00 Pacific
Duration: 1 minute
No of observers: 4

Location: Athens, TX, USA

Shape: Orb


We saw a light in the night sky which appeared to be a satellite, but was moving much too fast.

First of all let me say this. I love to watch those UFO shown on Discovery and TLC. But I do so for entertainment purposes. I think, or thought, the whole UFO thing was a bunch of bunk. But last night I saw something that was truly unknown to me. I was standing outside a ham radio friend's house and we were talking about amateur satellites. There were four of us in this group. A kid in the group started pointing out constelations. When I started looking at what he was pointing out, I noticed what I thought was a satellite. It appeared to be a star which was moving from south to north, and it tracked almost straight overhead. It looked just like a low orbit satellite (I've seen many of those before) but it was moving much too fast. A low orbit satellite would take about 10 minutes to track across the night sky. This object took under a minute. There were no flashing lights or sounds associated with this object. In fact, I told the others it was probably a satellite, but I later decided that it couldn't have been. Then I thought it could have been a piece of space junk entering the earth's atmosphere, but this object left no trail or flaming debris. I have ruled out in my mind all the possibilities. As much as I hate to admit it, I have seen an Unidentified Flying Object. If you guys know what this light could have been, I would love to hear back from you. I'm all out of explanations.



NUFORC Note:

We wonder whether the witness was observing either "Mir" or the International Space Station passing overhead. PD


Posted 2000-12-20

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