2002-08-10 - Grand Rapids, MI - Fireball

Michigan Fireball 500 Lights On Object0: Yes

I was driving to my aunts house, it was a saturday morning about 11:15am. Clear blue skys with few thin hazy clouds, when I finally arrived to the hous and park the car on the driveway for some reason (maybe because of the awsome weather rare in west michigan) i looked slighly up and there it was, a "small burnt orange ball in the blue sky it was stationary, I imediatlly called my aunt to come out and see "the thing" and with her came out my uncle and cousin, we all streared with disbelieve, the object did moved a bit side to side but that was only perceivable when looked at for seconds straights. It is very hard to come up with a approximate size or distance since the sky was so nice, but for one second I thought it might be a hot air balloon so I asked my aunt if she had binoculars or something like it, she went inside and handed me a set of bird watching monocular ( it looks like only one side of a binoculars. It took me a while to sight the object with the monocular but finaly I did and TADA! it was not a baloon, The best description of the object is a big red sphere with three smaller orange smi-spheres toghether, one thing that was very interesting was that we were able to see some sort of "vapor" around it (like when the asfalt is very hot) The object started moving slowly north, almost like drifting, then it stop completly and started moving south east this time a bit faster and longer to the point that we almost losted in between houses but all of the sudden the thin just rocketted north west to the oposite side, the speed was not super super fast but but it was faster than anything that I have ever seen flying including fighter planes specially considering how hight it was. just a second after the thing blasted across the sky what it look like a business "lear" jet cross the sky with the same trajectory almost as if it was fallowing IT.