2010-11-08 - Nashville, TN - Triangle

Triangular shaped lights traveling extremely fast seen in binoculars over Nashville TN

Ten years ago I witnessed an object in the sky I could not explain. I sent an email to someone well known for his knowledge in unknown arial phenomena to get his opinion. He stated he did not know what it was that I saw. Regardless of his comment I eventually dismissed my sighting as space debris.

Now 10 years later I revisited my email and realized that my space debris explanation was not sufficient, mainly do to the speed of the object (which from the email apparently concerned me back then as well). For that reason I decided to file this report.

Most of it comes from the email I sent 10 years ago. I did however add to the report from current memory where the information was lacking from the email. Therefore most of the report was recorded the day after the sighting.

Here is my report.

I arrived home from work to my home in the suburbs of Nashville, TN last night at about 12:20 AM CST Nov 8th, 2010. I decided to take my 20x80 astronomical binoculars out to look at Jupiter. I had seen a bright star which I mistaken for the planet. The star turned out to be Sirius.

Since I had the binoculars out I decided to look at the stars. I focused on a patch of stars directly over head at the zenith and suddenly something came into my field of view and very quickly exited. It traveled through the center of my view and not kidding it traveled from one side of my field of view to the other in 1/5th to 1/10th of a second. The timeframe stated is not arbitrary. I spent about 10 minutes recapping the event from memory trying to determine the amount of time it took to traverse my field of view. The object was headed directly southeast. It traveled so fast that I could hardly make out the form of the object. What I saw were three well defined white lights in an equilateral triangle headed point end first. There was absolutely no sound in the sky, no sound of a jet engine.

Using astronomy software called Stellarium I was able to estimate that the object was about 7 to 10 arcminutes in size however, this estimate was made from my current memory and not made 10 years ago.

My first thought after witnessing the object was that I had seen a satellite. It wasn’t until maybe 20 minutes later that it occurred to me that satellites don’t appear as triangles.

The next day (Nov 9th 2010) I went outside to compare what I saw to high flying airliners. I witnessed one airliner at about the same location and it traversed my field of view in 4 seconds. What I saw was traveling across the sky much faster.

Binoculars I used were Cabela’s 20x80, field of view is 2.7 degrees, 141 ft at 1000 yds.