2005-02-19 - Rockville, MD - Cigar

Cigar-shaped object seen for several seconds then disappeared from area of sight.

I don't know how significant this is, but I thought it was worth reporting nonetheless. I should say that I'm a college student who has studied Astronomy throughout high school and college, so I feel I'm a pretty observant person.

Last Saturday, February 19th, at around 2:35 PM, I was sitting at a traffic light when I just decided to look up at the sky since it was such a gorgeous day, not a cloud in sight whatsoever. I looked over to my left, which would be looking north, when I noticed an object in the sky at about 45 degrees elevation to my line of sight. It was greyish in color and cigar-shaped, and was traveling at quite a brisk pace; if I had to estimate the speed in relation to a car on the ground, I would say about 30 miles per hour. If I had to estimate the size of the object, I would say it was about the diameter of a quarter if held at arm's length. I would estimate the elevation to be 500 feet above the ground at the most. If memory serves me right, this would make this a right isosceles triangle, meaning that the distance on the ground between myself and the object was about 500 feet. I feel this is about right. The object also seemed to be "hazy" - it would best be related to heat fog that one sees when looking down a tarmac road on a hot day.

When I first noticed the object, it was traveling west, parallel to the direction my car was facing at the traffic light. I was looking out to the north, and my car was facing the east. I was intrigued by it because it was definitely not a helicopter, because it was flat, and did not have any rotar blades. I see a lot of helicopters in this area, and even if they are as far away from me as this one was, I can hear noise, but this made no sound. I got the impression that it was not way far away in the distance, but was close. After watching it for several seconds, I looked ahead to see if the traffic light had changed, and upon seeing that it was still red, I looked back to where the object was traveling, where it should have been had it continued along the same path, only to find that it was gone. Just gone. Surprised, I looked around the sky intently, thinking that it might have changed direction. I still could not find it, and I never saw it again.

The object was traveling in the middle of the sky when I noticed it, and I only took my gaze away from it for 2 seconds, so I have no idea where it could have gone in that time if it really was just a plane or helicopter. I spent the next 15 seconds before the traffic light changed looking all over the sky, just in case it had disappeared due to the sun's reflection, but I still could not find it. I would argue this was possibly a conventional airplane, except I cannot get over the fact of how a conventional aircraft could disappear that fast. There were no trees it could have disappeared behind, nor any cloud cover.