2005-06-04 - New York, NY - Light

Slow moving star-like object seen during daylight hours

I was sitting out on my front porch (second floor) on Saturday, June 4th, at about 7:35pm. There is lots of airplane activity over our house, as we are directly under a major flight pattern coming from JFK airport. I always like looking up at the planes, especially when they are lower.

At about 7:35pm, a plane flew directly overhead. As I looked up to watch it, I saw what I first thought to be a star. The plane flew past, but I kept looking at this light. My wife saw it too. It was still very light out, and this star would have to have been very bright.

After a few seconds, we noticed that it started moving towards the east. At first, my wife thought it may be a balloon very high up, but it was moving too slow and too uniformly to be a balloon blown around by the winds.

After about 3 minutes of very slow movement, the object stopped. During the time it was moving, my wife ran inside real quick to get the digital camera. She also witnessed it begin to move, and then stop moving. Once it stopped, I took the camera, and tried to get a picture of it. As I was training the camera on the object, it basically vanished. We didn't see it zoom off, it just stopped being there.

My wife is a bit of a skeptic, but even she thought it was weird looking. She keeps saying it could have been a balloon, but she seems to be trying to convince herself more than me. I'm still not sure what it was, but it had the brightness and look of a star, but it didn't twinkle. It was stationary, moved to the east slowly and in a straight line, and then stopped again, before disappearing. By 7:40 it was gone (according to timestamp on the camera).

I did take 3 pictures of the sky, but the object was gone at that point. I thought a viwe of the sky might pick it up, even if I couldn't see it anymore (if it had moved to another location quickly). But all 3 photographs show nothing.