1991-08-12 - Niece (France) - Light

"Satellite" takes sudden, abrupt right angle turn.

It was the middle of August, 1991, I was lying down in a field in the mountains outside Nice, France with a girl whom I had recently met, we were talking. The sky was pitch black and the stars were very bright. Directly overhead I saw what I thought was a satellite moving slowly south to north. It was a steady dim light, like a star, but moving. I pointed it out to her and explained the difference, visually, between a satellite and an airplane. An airplane has blinking lights and a satellite looks like a slowly moving star. As I was explaining this, the object suddenly took a left turn (a right angle with no curve or change of speed) and began to move east for a few degrees and faded to black. I stopped speaking and watched in disbelief as I understood enough about physics to know that what I was watching was physically impossible to take place, at least for a satellite. I quickly asked her what she had seen and she said, matter-of-factly, that "! it turned left" not knowing or understanding that what we saw could not have happened in a "normal" world. I tried to explain to her what I was thinking and what I understood to be "normal", but she didn't seem concerned by the strangeness of what we had seen. By the fact that my father is a physicist, engineer and an amateur astronomer and that I grew up looking at the stars with more than a basic understanding, and that she had no science background or interest in science at all, my concerns of the abnormality of the moment were not shared.