NUFORC Sighting 139160

Occurred: 2018-03-13 06:30 Local
Reported: 2018-03-13 06:10 Pacific
Duration: 10 minutes
No of observers: 1

Location: Taos, NM, USA

Shape: Triangle
Characteristics: Lights on object, Aircraft nearby

Extremely bright single light changed into three lights in a triangle moving from West to East, very high in the sky.

At approximately 6:30 am on 3/13/18, I walked out to my front yard, after letting our dog outside, to close our gate that had been left open all night. After closing the gate, I noticed a flash of bright light up in the sky, out of the corner of my eye. I focused my attention to the area where I saw the light and saw it flash again. Even though the object was very high in the sky (much higher than a passenger jet flies) it was almost like a very bright spotlight shining down on me. It is probably the brightest light I have ever seen in the sky.

After seeing it flash two or three times like that, on the third or fourth time it flashed it was three separate bright lights in the form of a triangle. On the next flash it was back to one light only. The object was generally moving from the west to the east and was moving much slower than any satellite that I have ever seen before. At the same time there were several military aircraft in the sky, which is not unusual for our area, but none of them seemed to be paying any attention to the object as it kept moving towards the East.

I was an air traffic controller in the United States Navy and know about aircraft and what they look like and how they behave in the sky and have never seen anything like this before. The extremely bright light was flashing with the approximate interval of 15 to 20 seconds (way too long an interval for either commercial or military aircraft) and there were no green or red lights associated with it. If the light had been considerably dimmer and if it was moving faster, I would have known that it was a satellite, but I don’t think this was the case. I watched the object for about 10 minutes and lost sight of it.

Posted 2018-03-23