NUFORC Sighting 35192

Occurred: 1971-09-15 10:30 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2004-02-20 11:00 Pacific
Duration: 1 minute
No of observers: 1

Location: San Antonio, TX, USA

Shape: Oval
Characteristics: Aura or haze around object

Daylight sighting of an oval shaped lighted phenomena appears and reappears several times

I was sitting in my 7th grade math class at Riley Jr. High (now Martin Luther King jr. High) listening to, along with the rest of the class, the teacher's lecture. It was a morning class, and I believe it was about 10:30 am. I was sitting by the window and happened to look out toward the east (about 30 degrees to my right) and saw an odd lighted shape, sort of like the left half of a lighted oval, at about 20 degrees above the horizon. Toward the east is an area with a few houses and about a half mile of heavily wooded and at the time undeveloped land on either side of Salado Creek (the creek was about a quarter mile to the east of the school and runs north to south ). That land currently contains Martin Luther King Park. It was a largely clear day, but it seemed as though the lighted oval was behind a patch of cloud. This shaped did not appear to be a solid object. There was no noise associated with this sighting. There was no noise associated with this sighting and I do not recall seeing or hearing any other aircraft in the area.

While trying to figure out what this shape was, the shape faded away. A few seconds later, the shape reappeared slightly to the right and above the first location. This time it was brighter, with a distinct symmetrical oval shape to the phenomena, and bright white in the interior. In the middle of this oval was what looked like a thin bright horizontal line, much like a filament in a light bulb, which was centered in the oval and taking up about half the horizontal dimension of this oval. This central filament type light was bright, but not painful to look at.

At this point, there was no question in my mind that I was seeing something that was unlike any aircraft that I had ever seen. San Antonio in 1971 had substantial Vietnam related military flight activity from Ft. Sam Houston, Randolph AFB, and Kelly AFB, especially the frequent low level helicopter flights of UH-1 Huey helicopters. Whatever I was looking at was nothing like any military or civilian aircraft I have seen either before or since (as an adult, I became a licensed pilot and was an Air Force flight test engineer).

As I was about to get the attention of the classmate sitting in front of me it faded out once more. It came into view a third time, again slightly above and to the left of the previous appearance. Like the first view, it appeared to be behind some kind of mist or light cloud and was only partially visible, with the left and top part of the shape being visible. The bright filament was not visible, and this time I could see what looked like a very small reddish tapered dome on top. The tapered dome was relatively small, roughly one tenth the width of the full oval and about one fifth the thickness of the main oval.

After a few seconds, it faded away again. I looked all around the sky for it and about ten seconds later saw almost directly overhead a white light fade in an out of view twice. It did so at a rate roughly the same as the interval between the first three sightings of the phenomena. However, these last two were more points of light and I could not discern any shape to it. The entire sighting lasted roughly one minute.

I took a fair bit of ridicule about this whenever I mentioned it, so I kept quiet about it. About two years later when I was in high school, a classmate (who I had never told about my sighting) related a story about some odd phenomena he saw one night in the same general part of town near Salado Creek. When I asked him to explain how it looked, he described the oval shape and the filament type light in the middle. I could not tell from his description if it was exactly the same phenomena I had observed.



NUFORC Note:

Date is approximate. PD


Posted 2004-03-02

© 2023 National UFO Reporting Center. All rights reserved. Use or reproduction within any application without written consent is prohibited.