NUFORC Sighting 144687

Occurred: 1991-09-18 03:00 Local
Reported: 2019-01-27 11:20 Pacific
Duration: 15 minutes
No of observers: 1

Location: Jekyll Island, GA, USA

Shape: Oval


Ground based sighting on Georgia USA coast north of KSC, FL, possibly related to STS-48 UFO cargo bay camera capture.

My “UFO” sighting occurred on the early morning of September 18, 1991, while on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in an Atlantic Ocean front motel room by myself. I was there as an employee of the United States Customs Service attending a supervisors' training class with a co-worker.

On the morning of Sept. 18, 1991, at 3:00 a.m., I woke up wide awake, so I went out onto the balcony overlooking the ocean. The sky was partly cloudy with moonlight illuminating the clouds and waves. I didn’t see the moon as it likely was on the other side of the building out of my view. The hotel building or my room was situated so the at ocean view was looking south down the beach not directly viewing the ocean.

Within a minute standing there on the balcony, I saw a very fast flying whitish (similar shade or brightness as the moon would be) oval shaped fuzzy not sharp edged light about the size of a 1/4 full moon (LARGE!) - flying overhead very fast (above the clouds) over the hotel building! from north to south down the coast (disappearing within 3-4 seconds). It didn't make any noise that I could hear.

About a minute later I saw another one exactly the same flying the same trajectory down the coast. Then about a minute later I saw another one (or at the time I was thinking it might just be a satellite going around the Earth, but it was too big and too fast from other satellites I’ve seen...).

Then I saw two of these lights flying side by side in formation and knew it wasn't the same one I had been seeing. Then one zig - zagged and others were flying slightly different trajectories all from north to south down the ocean coast. All were the same size and brightness, going the same speed and making no noise at all. In those 15 minutes between 3:00 and 3:15, I saw 10 of these "lights".

My theory is the bottom of the “crafts” were being illuminated by the sun beams which had not yet made it to the east coast in other words there were no lights on the crafts, it looked more like reflected light. If someone could model that, the size and distance and speed of these crafts could be calculated. These things were not man-made… they were too big and far too fast for humans to have created them.

I never saw anything in the newspaper or on TV about what I saw, and then as time went on didn’t think about it much.

Years later when the Internet was available to general public, I learned that the Space Shuttle STS-48 mission was supposed to land at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) at 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 18th (just 15 minutes after I stopped seeing the UFO’s), but NASA aborted or redirected the landing to Edwards AFB in California instead, citing bad weather in Florida. My location Jekyll Island is only 180 miles north from the KSC and the weather certainly wasn’t bad at all that morning.

Years later someone discovered a STS-48 NASA TV footage recorded on TV (from the STS-48 Space Shuttle cargo bay camera televised on the NASA cable TV channel) that was apparently or estimated to have been recorded on Sept. 15, 1991, showing really interesting "lights" in what appears being fired upon from a ground based laser beam – and making evasive moves! I wonder if what I saw three days later was related to that recorded incident. NASA called the lights in that video "ice crystals." I question why would we be using ground to space based laser beams (President Ronald Regan’s SDI program?) to shoot "ice crystals" in space? Check out the STS-48 UFO videos. What did NASA see on that same morning, which caused them to abort and redirect the planned KSC landing over to Edwards AFB instead?

Posted 2019-02-01

© 2023 National UFO Reporting Center. All rights reserved. Use or reproduction within any application without written consent is prohibited.