NUFORC Sighting 143013

Occurred: 2018-09-06 01:20 Local
Reported: 2018-09-06 16:29 Pacific
Duration: 3 seconds
No of observers: 1

Location: Seattle, WA, USA

Shape: Formation
Characteristics: Aura or haze around object

Six fast white spheres appear briefly in the night sky flying north to south.

Last night I was skywatching with binoculars in the hopes of seeing anomalous craft. This is an activity that I do along withy my brother with some frequency in the summer. In the last few weeks we've seen some strange fireballs and flashes that couldn't be accounted for by known aircraft or satellites.

My process with the binoculars is to watch one area of the sky for a few minutes, then move to another area and wait. I often can see satellites not visible to the naked eye this way, and I can track them across the sky easily with the binoculars. I am an experienced skywatcher and can distinguish most aircraft, satellites, and meteors.

I was looking towards the west and a series of objects entered the frame of the binoculars from the north. It consisted of six white spheres arranged in a straight line, but the line itself was oriented maybe 15 degrees to the right of the direction of travel. A good analogy is if you took a v-shaped flock of flying geese and removed half the geese.

I immediately started tracking the objects across the sky until they reached the horizon to the south. The binoculars I was using were 7x zoom, and the full width of the formation filled roughly one third of the view area of the binoculars. The formation was very fast, from the moment I began tracking it to the moment it was beyond the horizon was less than three seconds. The spheres themselves were several times larger than a commercial airliner appears in the binoculars at cruising altitude (30,000 feet). The objects themselves appeared to be quite high, but judging by their size it seems unlikely they were in space.

The objects themselves are difficult to describe because of their speed. They obviously were lit, but only dimly. It almost appeared if they were a projection, perhaps semi-transparent. They somewhat reminded me of seeing spotlights projected onto clouds when I was a child, but the sky was clear and there was nothing to project onto.

Posted 2018-09-13