2003-11-07 - Englewood, FL - Light

A large bright light moved swiftly across the ocean after sunset suddenly stopped and didn't move any more.

My wife and I were fishing on Manasota Key in the Gulf of Mexico near Englewood Florida. We had been fishing most of the afternoon while waiting for the sunset. This was day 6 of a three week vacation. We had been to the beach for the sunset about every evening. It was just after the sun had gone below the ocean. The sky was clear. My wife pointed and said can you see that bright light? It's moving. I looked to the southwest in the direction she was pointing and immediately saw a light at an elevation of about 30 deg above the ocean horizion. It looked like the landing light of a large airplane. It was as large or larger than Mars was at it's closest this summer. The light was white, steady, and unblinking. It moved from the south toward the north parallel with the horizon. It looked like it could be a fast moving airplane. We watched it for about 10 to 15 seconds. It came to a complete stop without slowing, it just stopped almost due west of us (about 260 deg). We watched it for another 20 minutes and it did not move anymore. We talked about how far it had moved as we watched it. If you held up a yard stick (3 ft) in the middle at arms length, it traveled about the length of the measure in only 10 or so seconds. We looked around the clear sky and could see other lights from planes moving both high and low. All were blinking and all were closer to us than the light and moving much slower in comparison to the speed of the light. We watched two aircraft pass between us and the light in the approach to SouthWest Regional Airport at Ft. Myers. We have taken that flight several times ourselves. It was impossible to tell how big or how far the object was except it was far beyond the normal path of the aircraft and much bigger than the lights of the commerical airliners we were looking at. We finally left after half an hour and it was still there. The following Monday (11/10/03) we went back to the beach at sunset to see if the light was still there. During the same time period on the 10th, no ! light was present. We went again on the 11th (Tuesday, 11 November 2003) and after sun set, suddenly the light appeared in about the same location we saw it in on Friday after it had stopped but just a little more to the south of west (about 250 deg). We had watched the sun set and had a sense of time of setting objects. A while after the sun had set, it was completely dark, the object began to slowly sink toward the horizon until it went out of sight below the ocean level. It did not sink as fast as the sun did. The ocean horizon at a standing elevation is about 12 miles away. We did not see the light any more. It could have been in space for all we could tell. It looked like a big bright flood light. I have followed UFO reports for some years. Except for an incident in 1954 when I saw 5 silver disk the size of a new dime, at arms length, in a V formation, go over in Kentucky, I have never seen anything I could not identify. I read several other people have seen very large bright lights recently. Perhaps something similar. My wife and I are both college grad professional people.