2005-08-22 - Minnetonka, MN - Triangle

Triangular plane like object seen close to ground with little noise, moved very little over the course of 26 seconds then was gone.

I was pulling off of the highway and thought I was seeing mars in the distance. I was driving towards it in my car and noticed it was too close to be mars because it was growing in size with regards to my approach.

I pulled towards it and noticed some blinking lights... but it was not moving or not moving much. I pulled into the CompUSA parking lot on Hopkins Crossroad and 394 and observed it some more... it seemed to be about 200 feet away.

At first I thought it was a plane, but it wasn't moving quickly enough. It was very close. I considered a helicopter, but it didn't seem to be the right shape or light configuration.

I parked my car, grabbed my camera, and stepped out into the parking lot. As I grabbed my camera, it started to move. Outside of the car I could hear a slight whirring sound like the sound of a jet, but it was way too quiet to be that close to me. In addition, the sound was not shifting like a Doppler effect would cause. It was constant.

I had been taking photos of the moon (or trying to), so my camera was set to accommodate the brightness of the moon against the night sky. I was not thinking straight enough to realize this until after around five photos taken... probably over the course of 10 seconds. Still too shocked to think straight, it traveled past me and I stopped taking pictures to get a better look at it with my eyes.

It definitely had lights and looked like a very triangular plane of some sort. It looked closest to the F117 shape if it was a plane. It had two white lights and a flashing red light in the middle... again, like a plane might have. But it was much closer than a plane could have been, was traveling too slowly, and wasn't loud enough.

I changed the settings on my camera and, by that time, the object had passed by me (this is around 15-20 seconds since I stepped out of my car). I started taking some pictures that actually turned out. The lights kept the same spacing, more or less, despite the angle from which I was viewing it. It was black and when the red light flashed, I could see a slight outline of the thing. The two photos that came out best show it against a building.

It moved across only 15% of the viewing area between the two photos and my digital camera stamped the times five seconds apart. That seems far too slow to be a plane. The object seemed to be pulling over the highway when I noticed another set of lights to my left. I watched those for a moment... but I realized that those were just a normal plane. I turned back to watch the original object but it was nowhere to be seen.

I got in my car and tried to follow approximately where it seemed to be headed but I didn't see it again. I have those photos and they mostly show the two white lights.

I drove to a hill where I saw a UFO zipping around in the distance around six years ago and I saw what might have been it quite a bit further out. It was moving slowly, again, and it was moving in the opposite direction. Over the course of two minutes it made its way across the whole horizon. It might have been a standard plane... the camera was having a hard time snapping photos that showed any detail. The only thing odd about it was the trajectory... it was moving in an arc instead of a straight line. But it never came much closer.