2009-12-26 - Reno, NV - Unknown

Faint object seen shooting over Cold Springs Valley in Reno, Nevada

Time is approximate on this, sorry! I and one of my brothers were visiting our brother in Reno, Nevada over Christmas. His house is in the Cold Springs Valley area! I stepped outside his garage to have a cigarette, on the side of his home. It was still dark outside, but with a faint glow of the sun just barely starting to lighten the sky. Not knowing exactly which direction his house faces, I will only suggest that I was on the east side of it at this time! Being a believer of this type of thing, I always watch the skies in the hope that I will see something, and this time I did! I was looking upwards, and I had high thin clouds to my right, but the skies were mostly clear. I looked to my left more, and caught a fain object shoot past my field of vision at a very high rate of speed! And I mean fast! As I said, maybe only 2 seconds of viewing time! What ever it was, it was not at an altitude to be lit by any sunlight because there was only a hint of lightening of the sky at this early hour! And I saw it for such a short time span, than I can't even tell you what shape it was, either! It was there, and then gone! It's size I would approximate as being about the size of a pencil eraser, held about 8-10 feet away, looking straight on. I went inside and told my brothers about this and one suggested that it might have been a bird! But this was way too fast to be a bird! And the other, which I tend to partially agree with suggested that it might have been a meteor! The one problem I have with this is that I don't know a great deal about celestial bodies, but this seemed an awful lot closer to the ground than a meteor! I would say no farther than 7-9,000ft above me! I tried to follow it's path, to see if it would reflect any light from somewhere, but, nothing! It was pretty faint, and was gone really too quickly!