NUFORC Sighting 84844

Occurred: 2009-05-30 20:00 Local
Reported: 2011-10-26 03:45 Pacific
Duration: Hours
No of observers: 3

Location: Floyd, VA, USA

Shape: Sphere
Characteristics: Lights on object, Emitted other objects, Emitted beams

Light in sky that moved and looked like a satellite but stopped completely still

This was submitted to MUFON on 06/27/2009 and is in their database.

Our location was Lat 36°49'57.27"N Long 80°18'59.93"W I am a police officer in las vegas for 9 years and a former Marine and this event was also witnessed by my best friend a National Park ranger and my father who is a retired Marine who was a scout/sniper and we are all very in-tune with nature and nautical/astronomical events... i had to start out with that because, we together have seen just about everything and are highly trained observers, if that makes this any more believable i don't know.. This happened and stopped our evening in its tracks for hours..

I know what it wasn't but i have no idea what it is..

We were in the blue ridge mountains of Virginia, the nearest large town would be Floyd, VA, at my family farm and we had just gotten done building a deck on a new house on my property. My father was sitting in a chair facing north and me and my buddy were facing him to the south-south east standing up. The time was approx 2000hrs EST on 05-30-2009 and it was still fairly bright and cloudless sky. My father asked "what is that? is that a planet" and pointed over our heads toward the north. We turned around and observed a sphere shaped object brightly illuminated and about 3mm in relative size. I later shot an azimuth from my compass and it was 20 deg (magnetic north, declination for that area is 8deg W so approx 12deg true) and approx 50 deg from horizon. it was the brightest object we have ever seen that seemed to be either a planet, star or a satellite. my dad was still sitting and asked "is that moving?" i tried to keep it referenced to the roof of the house to see if it w! as but i couldn't tell. he said that before he said anything to us it had moved down about 10deg. we all looked through 20 power bino's and all saw that it was round and completely illuminated equally around but nothing else remarkable about it. we came to the conclusion that it was a northern geo-stationary satellite but were not satisfied with that due to that it looked way to close to our location and from its large size. (after finally getting back to civilization i tried to find what sats are stationary in the northern sky's and couldn't locate any, any help on that? are there any?) we watched it for approx 45 mins and our talk turned to other strange things we have seen in the sky over the years and about watching satellites floating by. We all went inside to grab some chow and came back outside to eat and the object was gone. This kind of made us re-think what it was we saw..

So now we were really into talking about what that was and had our heads strained to the sky. My buddy spotted a satellite traveling north to south at around 60deg from horizon. it was now approx 2045 hours and some of the brighter stars are appearing. i picked up visual of the object and it seemed to be just a satellite, the dull glow, size and speed were typical. My dad was having a hard time picking it up so i spotted a bright star (Ive tried to figure out exactly which star it was but i couldn't tell you) the star was to the SSE and at around 45/50 deg to the horizon and the brightest object in that sector. I asked my dad to look at that star and i began to call out the position of the satellite, ie; "its 9 o'clock high about 3 hand widths away, now its 10 o'clock its now at the 11 o'clock" all relative to the bright star.. and so on, he still was having trouble picking it up. I finally had him look at the 2 o'clock position and a hand width away and me and my friend cal! led it out "its now at its 12, 12:30, 1 o'clock..." and as it got to the 2:30 position it just stopped. we both yelled out "it freaking stopped!" it didn't slow down, it didn't fade out, it stayed a constant brightness and speed until it just stopped dead..

At this point i was really freaked. my father never did get to see it before it stopped but saw it after the fact but now it looked like a regular dim star..

Me and my bud never let our eyes off of the object for the next 4 hours. we actually took turns resting our necks. we finally just layed down and kept on starring at it waiting for it to move.

during this i would see flashes of light popping off in specks near it and other lights that looked like it was radiating out of the object but dismissed them to my eyes playing tricks. at one point i saw a beam of white light come from the 7:30 position from the object and shoot out approx one inch ( these will all be relative size to the object) this lasted a brief second. a few mins after that happened my friend said "i swear i saw something shoot out of that thing" and he recanted the same story as to what i saw.

about an hour later i saw another beam of light from the object, this time it looked like a harpoon getting shot out, kind of squiggly and again about an inch out but this time from the 5 O'Clock position. we both said "whoa!" and both described the same thing to my father independently so we wouldn't feed off each others story..

during this time we saw up wards of 20+ satellites floating by, all stayed on normal path and speed.

at one point toward the end of our event we saw a flash of light approx 2 inches to the 5 o'clock to the object and faded to a dimmer light. this object was round and looked like a satellite in brightness after it dimmed. this new object began to track south but after about 3 inches of travel it made a 90 deg turn and tracked easterly and quickly grew dimmer and smaller as if it was traveling to a higher altitude. we lost it after 7 inches of travel.. we continued our vigil to not loose sight of the original object that stopped moving until we lost sight of it behind a mountain.

i would have not spent one of the few days i get to spend time with my father and my best friend watching something in the sky that wasn't something that needed attention. i wouldn't have reported this and would have just added this to my list of strange stuff Ive seen if i hadn't heard i guy on the radio saying almost the exact story of what we saw and around the same date but in the western U.S... this needed to be documented. i know it wasn't a crazy story with an unknown spacecraft but like i said before.... i know what it wasn't, but i have no idea what it was. if someone can explain what i saw please do, its bothering me a bit..

Posted 2011-12-12