NUFORC Sighting 172963

Occurred: 2022-01-29 18:20 Local
Reported: 2022-11-13 12:43 Pacific
Duration: 15 minutes
No of observers: 2

Location: Webster city, IA, USA
Location details: About a mile and a half from the edge of town, just outside city limits to the west

Shape: Light
Characteristics: Aura or haze around object

Slow moving light across sky, that flickers and dissappears

As we drove home to Fort Dodge Iowa from Webster city Iowa, i noticed what I initially thought was a star. But a star I'd never seen in the night sky before (I'm very familiar with the night sky as I've always wanted to be an astrophysicist or aerospace engineer). And as we drove, I realized that the object was moving slowly across the sky. The object was fairly large, and very, very bright. Bright enough to outshine all but maybe one star in the sky. I told my girlfriend to take a left, and go west down a gravel road. When she did, I told her to stop the car and see if I could get a video of the object. In the video, I held the camera still enough to be able to see it move across the sky. I was paying attention to my screen to ensure a good video, but then I realized I might get better quality if I taped it in the raw camera mode on my phone. So I had stopped the video, switched to raw, and pointed my phone back at the sky. To my surprise, the bright object had seemingly vanished from the sky. That's when I wondered, if maybe I had captured it disappearing on my initial video. When I went and watched, during the last maybe 4 or 5 seconds of the video, you can watch it completely vanish. Before I zoom out, you see it flicker slightly a few times, and when I zoom out, maybe a second before the video ends, you watch the light suddenly go dark, and the object dissappear from view. From what I have seen of satellites, this was way too bright, and was moving way too fast to be an ordinary satellite. I had looked up to see if there were any known comets (even though one that size would have a large tail), or maybe some other sort of astronomical event happening. But my search resulted in nothing but blanks. I didn't know who exactly I could tell, or show my video to. Then I saw an article, with a link to this site. So, I felt like I should tell my story with you all, and maybe even the public should you deem it as significant enough.

In the photo I provided of the map, red is where we were stopped. Yellow is our where we had came from. And blue is the direction of travel of the object. I'm having issues with uploading my video, but would like to present it to someone. If there is and investigator that does decide to contact me, I could send it to him/her or anyone via email if that works better.

Posted 2022-12-22