NUFORC Sighting 76165

Occurred: 2010-07-04 22:00 Local
Reported: 2010-07-05 17:21 Pacific
Duration: Minutes
No of observers: 7

Location: North Bend, NE, USA

Shape: Unknown
Characteristics: Lights on object, Aura or haze around object

"Burning" flying object passes at least 3 times east of North Bend, Nebraska, USA

Object sighted: Yellow-orange flying object which appeared to be "burning" from the quality of the light.

Location: North Bend, Nebraska, USA

Direction: East
Angle of view: Approximately 30 degrees above the horizon.

My family and I spotted a flying object flying almost exactly north, in the sky east of North Bend, Nebraska. The sighting took place on July 4th, 2010. My wife and I were lighting fireworks in the back yard of her parents' house when suddenly the people at the house started talking and pointing to the east. They called out to me, "What is that?" I saw a light moving far in the distance. Initially I thought it was a helicopter because the light seemed to flicker, like the flame of a candle. However it was high and very fast and the light seemed to be one of burning, and not an electric halogen bulb like you see on modern aircraft. Additionally, there were no red and white strobe lights that are standard on regulation aircraft (we could clearly see these on commercial aircraft passing at cruising altitude high overhead). It continued north (it had first been spotted to the southeast of us), and the light didn't really change as our perspective of it did as it passed (i.e., there was no dimming effect like you might get from headlights passing you as the craft eclipses its lights, etc.).

It was flying quickly, at least the speed of a large helicopter or a plane. After a minute or so it was across the sky, and northeast of us, when it rather quickly faded out of sight entirely. This was surprising to us because we were seeing commercial jets far over head and could clearly make out their blinking red and white lights over an altitude of at least 15,000 feet.

The object (or a second one, identical to the first) appeared again about 15 to 20 minutes later, again in the southeast. It followed the exact same flight pattern as the previous, vanishing again in what we can say at best was the same spot as before.

A third and identical sighting took place roughly an hour after the first one. By the third time it came around, we had gone inside to get some binoculars. The object was difficult to focus on, but the characteristics of the light coming from the object was more akin to the flame of a candle than the steady shine of an electric source. I'd say it was about 10 times brighter at least than the brightest star in the sky at that point, and perhaps three times the diameter of any of the stars. My father in law was able to track it in his binoculars, and describes that it seemed like a round object, like looking at a disc on its side or perhaps a sphere, with the burning light coming from around the perimeter of the circumference.

All in all, the sightings took place between 10:00 pm and 11:00 pm, US Central time.

There were 6 adults and 2 young children at that house, and we all saw it each time. After the third one, my father-in-law and I went next door to see if the neighbor had seen the same thing. She and her two grandsons had seen it during one of the fly-overs. She thought at first that it was a basket from a hot air balloon, saying that the light's quality made her think of the hot air generator present in such balloons. But she quickly realized it was moving far too fast to be a balloon.

The object's trajectory was more or less level across the sky, parallel to the ground for an apparent distance of several miles, except at the end it could possibly have been increasing altitude, but hard to say without any precise measurements.

The following day (July 5th), we communicated with some family who live in Wichita, Kansas, and they saw the same object flying in the same direction.

Though the light was the brightest thing in the sky (the moon was not visible at this time), we heard no sound from the object on any of the three passes, only the sound of fireworks across town. Also there was not much wind that day, so the object(s) appeared to have had to be flying under their own power.

Posted 2010-07-06