NUFORC Sighting 68217

Occurred: 2009-01-22 13:15 Local
Reported: 2009-01-23 23:46 Pacific
Duration: 1 minute
No of observers: 2

Location: Tampa, FL, USA

Shape: Oval

metallic silver object clearly seen hovering in the afternoon over tampa and after a minute of observing vanished without a trace.

Time: January 22, 2009, 1:15pm Conditions: clear skies, sunshine, and clouds far into the distance Location: New Tampa east of Bruce B downs several lights north of the I75 overpass.

On the 22nd, me and my boyfriend were heading to USF for my class that afternoon. We were heading from our home down Cross Creek and traveling due south on Bruce B Downs blvd at about 45MPH. It was a clear Florida afternoon with clouds only in the distant horizon. Upon crossing the Tampa Palms region my boyfriend had spotted something in the sky and was laughing about how normally people who see UFO’s depict an object which seems very unlikely to be a UFO at all making the whole possibility even more far fetched. I looked up and saw an object in the sky just beyond the power/telephone lines crossing the road, and once we had passed under these I could clearly see the object without interference.

From the passengers seat of his SUV, the object appeared to be close to a 45 degree angle from the horizon, and about 5 degrees to the left of our car’s heading which looked to be just to the left of the center of the windshield from what I could tell. The shape was horizontally ovular with more of acute sides on the left and right forming near points. The texture seemed to be quote slick as the light reflection from the sun and shadow underneath were relatively free of distortion. The color of the object to the naked eye seemed to be silver hues or possibly a very metallic white, but either way the surface had very reflective properties. The top was very bright white with sunlight, but the bottom were tones of silver and grey with shadows that looked like slight reflections of the tree line below.

Being an aspiring scientist I immediately thought about all the possibilities and scenarios in my head and concluded it must have been a weird shaped blimp for an advertisement at one of the local stores near Amberly dr. I ruled out a plane instantly because it did not change size to indicate a northern or southern trajectory, and it did not waiver side to side in our view either. For the clarity of the sky and close proximity to us, I was able to rule out a helicopter instantly also. The object made no sound, had no impact on the tree line below, and no propellers or engines of any sort were visible.

Me and my boyfriend stared at the object while slowing down in our drive and I made the comment, “You know if this is what people seen when they reported UFO’s I can see how they make that assumption, after seeing this blimp, I would nearly claim it were a UFO if I had been startled or had bad eyesight myself.” As we got a little closer I started thinking how weird it was that the blimp/balloon had no advertisements on it, no personnel carriage underneath, or no tie down to a building below. We kept staring at the object as a full minute had passed with it in our sights and we still had no reasonable theories as to what it was.

My boyfriend laughed and stated that it must be a UFO then, and I agreed since it would be the simplest solution to the situation, and right when I had said jokingly ,“Yay aliens, how neat!” the object vanished right before our eyes. As bizarre as that sounds, I know. It reminded me of those home movies where a kid holds up a ball and says, “now it’s here………..now it’s not (and the camera recording breaks for a moment)” then the ball is suddenly not in the kid’s hand due to 2 separate recordings being edited together. It was a quick and abrupt vanishing act for this object. Now neither of us were laughing.

I continued watching, scanning, and searching the sky as we drove all the way to campus. There were still no clouds around, no chemical trails from an aircraft, no noise of an engine accelerating rapidly enough to be gone that quickly. Yet the object was nowhere to be found with no trace of where it went. It was gone before I could blink right before my very eyes and for the first time in my life I had no clues to lead me to any sort of conclusion.

We waited the last few days to see if any other reports surfaced in the news explaining what we saw, but to no avail. While I would love to have an alien encounter, I’m not sure what it was we saw and am not entirely convinced It was a UFO, I would like to put it out there for anyone who would like to find answers and put all these puzzle pieces together for us and the rest of the confused world. Thank you

Posted 2009-03-19