2003-01-24 - Natchitoches, LA - Light

Starlight object sparkels as star, drifts and travels awkwardly northeast, then fades and loses all light....

First of all, I never thought I'd be reporting ANY UFO sighting. However, I do believe in life beyond our planet and no, this is not a report based on my being an X-Files fan. I did not have any alcohol in my system and what I and my fiancee saw was as real as these words I now type. We had extremely cold conditions tonight due to the freeze that has hit much of the south. My fiancee and I were leaving our home at 1850 hours CST to meet a friend for dinner. We are both college professors, lest anyone doubt the validity and reality of what we saw. We live on the east side of the city where few if any street lights are lit. Our driveway runs north/south. We were walking from our north facing front door to my sedan to our right (east). My fiancee said, "Look up, the stars are so beautiful." I did, and at that moment as were looking toward the eastern sky, approximately 60-70 degrees above the horizon we saw what appeared to be another bright star, only moving. This light (star) moved to the left (north) of the constellation Orion. I knew the constellation well--Orion's belt and his inverted triangular upper point stars and his lower standard triangular lower point stars. This star-like light seemingly moved slowly north. It had no trail of a comet, did not travel quickly and leave a streak as a meteor or meteorite. The moving light was as bright as the surrounding stars, moved awkwardly, but mostly in a straight line. This star-like object did not blink in patterns as an airliner might, was not blinking red and green as a lower flying aircraft, it just stayed aglow. Then as it appeared to travel north-northeast, the light diminished in intensity, then faded as if losing power? switching itself off? or climbed higher out of the earth's surrounding atmosphere into space. The light flicked out. There were absolutely no clouds in the sky; the heavens were clear. We went to dinner shaking our heads, but we both agreed that the object we saw was real. In fact, when we arrived at our dinner location, we looked u! p toward the eastern sky again and saw two aircraft, one flying high and blinking its steady strobe flying westbound and we witnessed another low-flying aircraft with visible red and green lights as a comparison to our original siting. I truly believe what we saw was not an aircraft, meteor, meteorite, or satillite. This object had none of their characteristics. I hope other individuals saw this event in this part of Louisiana because I never would have believed this as a young boy, but I definitely can attest to this sighting, as well as my fiancee, that it was perfectly and absolutely real. We are still discussing the event even after telling our dinner friend; NOW, we are having a glass of wine.

((NUFORC Note: We suspect that the object may have been the ISS/Space Shuttle. At this writing, we are unable to check www.heavens-above for the information, but will try again. PD))