NUFORC Sighting 39752

Occurred: 2004-08-19 17:00 Local
Reported: 2004-10-12 21:32 Pacific
Duration: 4.5 hours
No of observers: 6

Location: Chaska, MN, USA

Shape: Rectangle
Characteristics: Changed Colo

Bright Object in skies above Minneapolis area, August 19th, 2004.

This is in response to the audio program you aired on 10-12-2004 on the object above the Minneapolis area. I was listening to the program and was also emailing one of your guests, Will. He suggested I provide a description of what I saw on August 19th, 2004.

I arrived home to Chaska, MN (about 5 miles from the Chanhassen Weather Center) from a business trip to Madison, WI. the last 110 miles of the trip heads pretty much East to West heading into and through the Minneapolis area. As I was unloading my vehicle my neighbor stopped by (he is retired military) and we chatted a little bit. When I asked him what I had missed the last couple of days, he pointed in the sky directly above us and said, "see that, it's been in the spot since 9:00 am this morning. I looked up in the sky and saw a very bright object, very high in the sky. I asked hime what it was, and he said nobody knows. He said reports had been on TV and radio, but nobody knew what it was.

I ran in the house and grabbed my 10X binoculars and focused in on it. It was very bright, light looking into a bright light and had a sloped rectangular shape (trapezoid?). The brightness was unusual. The light seemed to, well, move like when you look at an asphalt road and see the heat coming off the surface. As I watched it, I noticed from the middle of the object to the bottom of it, was a grey V shape. More like a rounded V, coming from the middle sides of the object and meeting at a point in the bottom of the object.

I ran back in the house and grabbed my video recorder. It has a 150X digital zoom. I tried to focus on the object, but couldn't keep it steady enough as I lay on my back in my yard. I recorded it for about a minute, then reviewed what I had recorded. All you could see was a bright light in the sky, it did not focus very well. So I went back to watching it through the binoculars. The object did move a little as I watched it. If I held my hands above my head, at a distance of about 2 feet apart, that is the distance it moved by 7:30pm. My military neighbor came back over to my house to let me know, that if it was something unknown, he was guaranteed that there would be military jets flying around. I just kept watching.

Around 8:30, I asked another neighbor to look at the object through the binoculars and describe what he saw. He saw it the same way as I did. His wife looked at it and agreed. Both were as curious as I was on what the object was.

By 9:00pm, the object had continued to move (another 2 feet measured by holding my hands above my head). As my neighbor and his wife watched with me, the sun began to sink into the horizon. As the sun goes down, it does turn a reddish orange. As the sun turned that color, so did the object. Leads me to believe the object was highly reflective, and reflecting light from the sun. As the sun went down, the moon was rising from the SW. The moon rose and the object stayed in the same location. Once the sun was totally below the horizon, we could no longer see the object. Even though there was still some sunlight left in the horizon.

Through the whole time I watched the object, it moved, drifted in a North to South direction. I wasn't looking straight up in the air, but the object was about 75 degrees above the horizon.

I checked for reports the next day if there were sightings to the South, like Iowa or Nebraska, and nothing was reported. BUT, I did see reports on August 20th that an object was noticed in the skies around Phoenix. Some of the pictures that were submitted looked very similar to what I saw.

Again, submitting this based on the comments Mr Rense made from your show.

NUFORC Note:

We have amended the time above to 1700 hrs. PD

Posted 2004-10-27