NUFORC Sighting 63788

Occurred: 2008-06-08 16:30 Local
Reported: 2008-06-09 20:18 Pacific
Duration: approx. 25 minutes
No of observers: 2

Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

Shape: Circle

solid, white object seen over S. F. Bay in high atmosphere, momentarily stationary

On Sunday June 8, 2008 my friend and I had just gotten out of a local museum, and were lying in the grass in Union Square (downtown San Francisco) from about 4-5:15 pm soaking up some sun. As we were lying there chatting, I noticed what I first thought were balloons (or a balloon) directly up into the sky close to the position of the moon. After watching it for about five minutes wondering what it was, I determined that it wasn’t moving around like balloons might on a windy day at high altitude (it’s been fairly windy in S.F. these past few weeks), and it was also too close to be a star or planet. I finally pointed it out to my friend, and he also suggested it was a balloon.

As we continued chatting, the object slowly began to pick up slight velocity drifting towards the horizon (towards the south), away from the position of the moon. After about 10 minutes of drifting, the object appeared to look like a hyphen (it looked like a ball before), and I pointed this out to my friend. Eventually we lost track of the object, and kept on with our conversation.

A few minutes later, I again looked back up towards the moon, and the object (or another object) reappeared to the location where we saw the first object. I again pointed it out to my friend, and we both thought it was odd that earlier it had slowly drifted towards the south, and was now instantly right back where it started. We left shortly after, not thinking too much about the whole thing.

The reason why I am posting this is because this morning on the news there was a short segment on an object that was observed (by whom I don’t know) Sunday afternoon over San Francisco Bay, and the news clip featured a video of the same object that we had seen. The segment didn’t say much about what the object was, just that the F.A.A. had taken notice. I am assuming many people had seen it if it had been featured on the Monday morning news, and was described on the news to have moved from above one city to another.

From my own observations, I can describe the object as white (non-metallic), not emitting light, larger than the size of Jupiter or Venus in the night sky, and fairly circular (upon our first observation). The object appeared stationary at first (the object did NOT get smaller as a balloon would upon rising), but later drifted across the sky (faster than planets and stars appear to move at night, but much slower than man-made satellites move). The object did not appear to change change size as it moved away, but did appear to look more liner as it drifted away. It was definitely not an airplane (it was close enough so that we could resolve its outlines and determine a circular shape from our perspective), and looked very solid.

The whole experience did not seem very normal, and I am greatly wondering how many other people saw it, and what it may have been.

Posted 2008-06-12