NUFORC Sighting 132725

Occurred: 2017-02-19 19:30 Local
Reported: 2017-02-19 20:55 Pacific
Duration: 20 minutes
No of observers: 1

Location: Siler City, NC, USA

Shape: Sphere
Characteristics: Lights on object, Aura or haze around object, Left a trail, Emitted beams

Brilliantly-lit fire-colored, slow-moving object, with blue-green efflux.

This is the first time in my life that I've reported a sky-borne object sighting. Because it was in the western sky, some people will think "oh, Venus" - fine. I'm not an astronomer, but I've spent many a starry, planety night gazing at this sky from my hot tub, and have never seen anything like this.

Tonight I had just stepped out onto my back deck, and this brilliant "fire in the sky" caught my eye, so I paused to watch it. It was higher than local planes fly, but seemingly lower than the cruising altitude of a international jet. It was moving slowly in the way that satellites do ... I always have fun looking for satellites in the sky because they're more-common to spot than shooting stars. But this was lower than a satellite. It was BRIGHT ... so bright that it almost hurt my eyes to look directly at it, but it was so fascinating that I made myself look anyway. The color of the object itself was yellow-orange, nearly exactly like fire, but the light coming from it towards the earth was a white light, which did not seem to be "panning" or searching ... it just seemed to be emanating. There was no flickering or blinking. In addition, there were a few shafts of brilliant blue-green light coming from behind it as the object slowly travelled toward me (from west to east). These almost neon blue-green rays were nearly obscured by the bright orange body of the object itself, but were colore! d so intensely that if you stared at it, you could clearly see them. If one were to speculate, one might think that they would appear as they did if they were part of a propulsion system.

The object made no sound. It was fairly high in the sky, at about 65 degrees. Its path of direction was not constant, as a standard satellite's would be. It slowly tracked closer to my home (a rural area, with few houses), then it seemed to stabilize its location. I went inside to do some internet searching of such phenomena, looked out the window about 10 minutes later and it seemed a bit further away to the west, and about a half hour after my initial sighting, I looked, and it was gone. (And at that time, I also noted Venus in the sky, looking much further-away and much like a planet, like it always does.) I am not so informed as to discount the possibility of extra-terrestrial visitors, but it seems much more likely to me that such an object could be military / government in origin. There are military bases within 50-100 miles to the south and east of me.

Posted 2017-02-22