This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/ufos by /u/Frugal_Ferengi on 2024-09-30 00:11:02+00:00.
I debated posting this, because I don’t have a picture, but I figured with my astro background, maybe this can simply be another data point in the bucket, or maybe more importantly help others with camera setups (I’ll mention this at the end). Here’s what my wife and I saw last night 9/28/2024 at 8:15PM Mountain Time, clear sky, in the Black Hills of SD.
I’m an astrophotographer, so I’m well-versed in what a typical night sky looks like in terms of high and low earth satellites, Starlink, northern lights, rocket launches, and military craft (we have a major Air Force base in Rapid City). I’m familiar with these because they often interfere with my astro shots, and I’m outside enough to notice them. The night sky between here and Wyoming is usually clear and stunning. That being said, what my wife and I both saw last night made our jaws drop. There is simply no man-made explanation for what we witnessed.
My wife and I were stargazing in our backyard around 8:15 PM Mountain Time when I personally noticed something odd: an orb with a gray haze surrounding it shot across the sky in about 6 seconds. It looked incredibly strange, and I mentioned it to my wife, who missed it. I tried to convince myself that maybe I was just seeing things, but then, as I pointed out the area I saw it in, a massive right-angle-shaped craft appeared from the northwest and crossed the sky to the east in about 10 seconds. It wasn’t V-shaped per se, but rather a perfect right angle.
To my eyes, the craft seemed to be in the upper atmosphere or low orbit, and it had to be the size of multiple football fields. There were a few planes in the sky, and this was way higher than those, but not as high as Starlink satellites, at least from what I could tell. What made it even stranger was the clearly visible under-lights, which were white and structured. Surrounding the lights was almost a grayish-white hazy aura, giving it an ethereal appearance. The whole craft, for lack of a better term, looked almost like a ghost ship with that eerie aura. When it passed above us, you could see both the lights and the structure. It moved silently, like a stingray gliding through the sky, smooth and quick and did not change directions. We only had about 10 seconds to observe it, just enough to grasp what we were looking at. Even if we had our astro gear set up, it wouldn’t have been a good enough shot to capture it because it moved too quickly and would have been blurry.
Based on my experience, satellites can take up to 2-5 minutes to cross the sky, but this took only 10 seconds and had a visible structure. It had to be moving at an incredible speed, way faster than any military aircraft in our area and faster than any satellite. I would estimate it was about 3 times slower than a typical shooting star.
My wife and I both confirmed what we saw. To avoid influencing each other’s perspective, we went inside and drew what we saw without sharing until we were done. We depicted the same craft. Later, we made a Photoshop image of it, which I’ll attach here below.
Based on my research, a typical Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite travels at about 7.8 km/s (approximately 17,500 mph) and takes around 5 minutes (300 seconds) to cross the sky, covering a distance of roughly 2,340 km. In contrast, the object I observed covered a similar distance in just 10 seconds, meaning it was moving at an incredible speed of about 234 km/s, or 523,440 mph. To put this into perspective, the fastest known spy plane, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, publicly has a top speed of over 2,200 mph. This means the object I saw was moving at speeds approximately 238 times faster than our fastest aircraft.
Personally I feel like the only way you could capture what we saw would have been with some type of combination of night vision goggles and a high-speed camera, and be extremely lucky to be pointing at the right part of the sky for that brief moment. There’s absolutely no way a cell phone camera could capture this, not even my Sony A7 III astro setup either. This is because it would require a long exposure shot, and with that speed, it would of just been a smear.
Our minds are blown, it’s kinda hard to go back to normal work after seeing this.
I used photoshop to try to show what we saw.
My wife’s picture recall on the left, mine on the right (I’m a bad artist).
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