NUFORC Sighting 99797

Occurred: 2013-07-05 22:15 Local
Reported: 2013-07-06 11:43 Pacific
Duration: 10 minutes
No of observers: 4

Location: Athens, TX, USA

Shape: Fireball

6 orange orbs moving east to west, sighted over a 10 minute period, in North Texas.

About 22:15 (10:15 pm cdt) on July 5, my family and I were sitting outside. When I looked up into the sky, I saw a fairly large orange glowing orb moving rapidly overhead right about 90 degrees of elevation.

It moved from East to West (retrograde, so was not a satellite) and lasted about a minute.

The brightness did not seem to change other than dimming as it moved away from us. The visual angle subtended an arc of about 120 degrees across the sky.

About one or two minutes later, we saw a group of three similar objects along the same flight path as the first one. My daughter used an iphone to take video, but it is fairly dark and hard to distinguish the objects.

About 3 minutes later two more objects passed overhead, again on the same flight path. There was no sound from the objects. It appeared as if they were glowing from heating up the atmosphere.

They moved much faster than orbital satellites (International Space Station, for example) or airplanes, but much slower than meteors and did not change brightness as a meteor would upon entering the atmosphere.

I am a retired military fighter pilot, retired commercial airline pilot and former astronaut.

I have no explanation for what we saw.

NUFORC Note:

Report submitted by former U. S. astronaut. We spoke via telephone with the source of the report, and we suspect that he is a superlative, and highly qualified, witness. PD

Posted 2013-07-14