2008-11-09 - Austin, TX - Other

Object was appearing in different places of the sky, changing magnitudes, and other bizzare behaviors.

My Mother and I were just about to lay down on our pool deck for a cigarette and star gaze as we usually do after dinner. As I lay down on my lawn chair (which are facing west) and looked up I saw an “unusual” object moving in the sky. The reason it caught my eye was because it was very bright but seemed to be very far away. The first thing I did was yell to my mom, “What the hell is that?” She looked up just before the object moved behind a small cloud. As it came out on the other side of the cloud it was no longer as bright as it appeared. It kept moving North (so as we lay there it look like it was moving left to right) just a little bit above Vega. After traveling for about 7 more seconds it slowly disappeared. At this point we thought that we were just looking at a satellite that, for some reason, appeared to very bright (a magnitude grater than -1) for those few seconds above us. To describe the type of light that it was giving off I used this analogy. When you are driving at night and cars are coming toward you, you notice that the head lights are sometimes a yellowish and on newer cars are more of a “neon white” if you will. The object in the sky looked more like the “neon white” headlights and the typical star and satellite look more like the yellowish headlights.

Approximately two minuets later at 19:02 the same bright “neon white” object appeared right above us again, but his time was going the opposite direction so more towards the south west. It then looked to change its course again so now it was heading almost directly South. At this time my mom and I started to really question what we were seeing because satellites do not change their direction from heading north to heading south. As we watched the object move “down” we kept saying to each other “what the hell is that?” it finally went out of sight. My mom told me that she was going to go get her binoculars, but I said, “screw that we needed a video camera, my phone (to know the time), and my journal (so I could write down what I was seeing while it was still fresh in my head), and a blanket. She was gone for about 5 minuets.

As she was walking up the pool deck stairs, at about 19:08 now, she asked me if I had seen it again and just as she asked me that I was looking off into the western sky below Vega but above Hercules and saw a much dimmer object that looked more like a satellite but it would appear then disappear and it did this about 5 times before it did not reappear again. What was strange was the time intervals in-between the appearing and disappearing was not constant and the light was more of a reddish light not the same “neon white” as before.

After watching this object and its many different behaviors, I can not say that it even remotely resembled anything that I have ever seen in our night sky before. It was not an airplane because airplanes stay on one direct path, it was not a satellite because however satellites do sometimes seem to be going in and out of vision, they do not change there apparent magnitudes as drastically as this object did. I think that it is also notable that from the time my mom and I were on our pool deck (19:00 to 21:00) we saw 4 big meteors and 1 huge meteor in which we could see smoke and debris on its tail.

I am a college student here in Austin and spend a lot of time studying the sky and weather I believe this was an “alien space craft” or just an object that I myself could not identify, is in my opinion, irrelevant. But if there is a rational explanation for what my mom and I were seeing I would love to know.