1999-11-17 - Denver, CO - Other

Observed large, dark, vaguely boomerang-shaped object move swiftly and silently from NE to S and then arc W

My husband, my mother, and I were sitting on the porch of my parents downtown Denver home giving Jupiter it's first look through our brand new telescope. We had planned to drive out to the eastern Plains in a few hours to catch the peak of the Leonid meteor shower and wanted to get the scope ready to examine Saturn while in the darkness of the countryside. My husband was actually looking through the scope and my mother and I were standing up looking at the planet unaided when I saw movement in the sky just below and to the right of Jupiter. I looked and saw what appeared to be a very large, irregularly shaped "object" moving at an accelerated rate through the sky. Now when I say I saw it, I'm not sure that entirely describes how I witnessed it. This thing, whatever it was, was camouflaged exquisetely. To be perfectly honest, I don't know how it even caught my attention in the first place. It almost appeared to be a piece of the night sky itself. Immedeatly, I started screaming and pointing at the object as it glided silently almost entirely undetectable. I was screaming "Oh my God, look! Look! Look! It's f---ing huge! What the f--- is that?" My mother spotted it a half second later and began screaming as well. When my husband saw it he began saying it might be a military aircraft and to watch closely as it passed by the stars that were in it's path. The military theory was quickly extinguished when we saw light from the stars behind it pass through revealing that it was actually transluscent. We began to run to keep it in our sights but then lost it in the glare of streetlights. We were unable to re-establish visual contact with the phenomenon. We returned to the house and scrambled to call Buckley Air National Guard. The individual there procceded to remind us of the meteor shower and offered the number of the Denver Airfield. The person there was equally apathetic and offered us the number of NUFORC. All three of us then drew pictures of the object independently without disscussing the details and ! came up with three remarkably similar shapes. The shape, like I've stated before, was an oddly irregular boomerang shape. I say boomerang for loss of any other descriptive word, for the object lacked the symmetry associated with a boomerang yet retained a decidedly boomerang shape. It appeared to be a slightly different texture than the sky which is probably the only reason it was visible at all. It's speed and apparent size were also immense.