2005-06-25 - Huntington Station, NY - Sphere

Object looked like a firery wheather balloon.

While in my backyard testing a GPS receiver on my laptop, a low flying, conventional, aircraft caught my attention while it passed overhead at about 2k feet. As I observed the aircraft, I notice directly behind it at approximately 15k feet was a slow moving shining sphere. I immediately ran inside and retrieved my binoculars and digital camera.

My first priority was to photograph the object but I had a very difficult time locating it in the viewer because of the distance. Using the top of cameras housing as a gun site I aimed and took three photos. Upon review using the LCD viewer I could not determine if I had succeeded in photographing the object. I traded the camera for my binoculars to get a better look. At first the object look like a scientific weather balloon with what appeared to be rigging hanging down from bottom to where a payload would be attached. It was at this point I justified my conclusion when I remembered strange news report earlier in the week of reports of weather balloons over the WTC site in Manhattan. As I continued observation of object with my binoculars, I could see that the rigging and payload at the bottom of object was swinging back and forth at a very violent rate. This seemed odd to me because the sphere did not oscillate nor did the rigging whip, while this was happening. Then just as my site of the object was to be blocked from trees, the bottom of the object turned bright orange that engulf three quarters of the sphere. At this point my view was blocked. I tried to circling around trees and climbing up on my deck to get a better view. After a few minutes and to my disappointment the object seemed to have disappeared and I could not relocate it. I did manage to get two blurry pictures of what looks like a white pinhead in the blue sky.