2000-08-18 - Gerlach, NV - Other

Three satellites moving across the sky in a perfect triangular formation.

On August 18, 2001 my brother-in-law and I were camping under the stars at Stone Coral, which is located in the remote northern regions of Washoe County, Nevada. Shortly after settling into our sleeping bags, my brother-in-law directed my attention to a moving triangle in the sky directly above us, passing from North to South. It actually appeared to be three satellites, but at the moment I wasn't certain. I grabbed my binoculars to get a closer look and I could see stars passing between the points, satisfying my curiosity that these were indeed three independent objects, rather than one solid object. What was unusual was that they were moving in a perfect triangular formation. From my perspective, their distance apart from each other was about two finger-widths at arm's length. I looked at my watch to note the time. It was 10:51 p.m. After about a minute or two, the lead object faded out followed by the trailing objects seconds later. Due to the late hour, and the location at which they faded, and the fact that they were moving slower than the average satellite, I concluded that they were much higher than the garden-variety low-Earth orbit satellites. After arriving home a few days later, I checked several of the satellite tracking web sites on the Internet in an attempt to identify what we saw. According to those databases, there were no satellites passing over that location at that particular moment.

((NUFORC Note: We suspect that the report may address a sighting of military/intelligence satellites, launched and orbitting in formation, but which do not appear in any publicly posted tables of orbitting objects. The description above by the witness seems to us consistent with a sighting of orbitting satellites. Similar reports should appear in future postings, if these objects are satellites, and if they continue orbitting for an extended period of time.

We include below a recent missive from Mr. Ed Cannon, noted "amateur" satellite watcher and space "buff" from Texas, who has been kind enough to keep us apprised of those events that seem to have a bearing on some of our reports posted here. Mr. Cannon can be reached at: Ed Cannon [ecannon@mail.utexas.edu]. We express our gratitude to him for his continued support of our activities, and for his excellent, and objective, critique of reports. We consider his statements to be highly reliable. PD))

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Hi Peter,

Thanks very much for your message -- very glad to hear from you! I don't get anywhere near the e-mail that you do -- and I have trouble keeping up with mine -- so I know what you mean about
accumulated e-mail.

You may certainly use my name and e-mail address with my notes. (Regarding the NOSS triangles or trios or triplets, a suspected fourth set was launched a few weeks ago, but so far as I've heard, to date only two objects [not counting the launch vehicle] have appeared. If this does prove to be another of the new-type NOSS triangles, we can expect a 33% increase in sightings of them.) ((October 24, 2001 message))

Ed Cannon [ecannon@mail.utexas.edu]

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