Occurred: 2005-08-15 21:15 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2006-03-09 14:56 Pacific
Duration: 1 minute
No of observers: 2

Location: Murmet Springs, IL, USA

Shape: Light
Characteristics: Left a trail

An extremely bright light that moved tremendously fast, stopped, flickered and then took off at a right angle to its previous path.

I am a Plant Manager in the manufacturing industry and my scuba diving buddy is programming technician for an international printing company. We are both forty years old and niether of us really had much of an opinion about UFOs until the night of our sighting.

We had traveled from Effingham, Illinois, to Mermet Springs, Illinois, in the southern most part of the state to go scuba diving at an old rock quarry which had been turned into a scuba faciltiy. We had ran into some severe storms on our way down but it turned of quite clear once we got to Mermet Springs. My son and a friend of his had come along to camp out with us.

After we arrived we sat up our camp, grilled some brats and ate. We then took our chairs and sat them so we could see the sky clearly because there was supposed to be a meteor shower that night after ten o'clock. We sat and talked for a while and were looking up at the stars waiting for the showers to begin. I was sitting to my friends right with my head leaned all the way back looking up when I noticed a light "pop on" in the sky to my right. I thought perhaps it was the north star but it was not. I kept my eye on it trying to figure out what star it was when it made a very sudden and tremendously fast move accross the sky moving to my left. It stopped as suddenly as it had taken off. The light sat there for about five seconds, flashed off then back on one time and then took off at a perfect right angle from the direction it had first moved. It traveled extremely fast. It was moving away from us this time. I could see what I would call a "light trail" behind it. After it made this move and took off it vanished and we did not see it again.

During the time that the light was visible during this event, neither my friend or I had said anything, moved or alerted the other one as to what we were seeing. Once it was gone I simply turned left to look at my buddy. He turned to look at me and simply said "yep, I saw that." We then talked about it for a little while basically trying to rationalize what could move that fast and stop suddenly and then take off again at a right angle to it's previous path. We could not come up with anything that made any sense based on our experiences. We both finally decided that we had seen a UFO and thought that was amazing! To describe the object all I can really say is that it appeared to be a bright light which very much resembled the North star except for this was much brighter. I could not see any shape at all since this object appeared to be very high up in the sky.

Neither my friend or I can say what this object was but we both know for sure taht it was not a meteor, aircraft, reflection, star, or any other object known to us.




NUFORC Note:

Witness indicates that the date of the event is approximate. PD


Posted 2006-03-11

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