2010-11-12 - Maple Grove, MN - Sphere

Daytime Sighting in Maple Grove

Hi, I am writing in about an incident that my wife and I witnessed today while driving home to Maple Grove from downtown Minneapolis this afternoon. We are wondering if anyone else reported this. We were traveling on West 694 about 2 miles out from the 94 interchange when we spotted a large round object over Maple Grove. It looked to be the area of Rush Creek golf course. At first I thought it to be a Hot Air Balloon but the closer we got the farther west it moved at incredible speed. (This when things got bizarre)

We turned onto the 94 exit and then instantly turned off onto the Weaver Lake Rd Exit and came up to a red light. While waiting along with a number of other vehicles we could see the large round object (with no distinct features) had turned and traveled back east about 5 to 10 miles in less than a minute and was hovering over Boston Scientific complex, about a ¼ mile to a ½ mile WNW clearly in view. We were watching this in amazement when out of nowhere (right in fron! t of us) a large Black unmarked Military style helicopter shows up and approaches the object. Right as this is happening we got the green and turned left onto Weaver Lake Rd. We made the left turn and noticed the Helicopter had veered off to the right of the object. Thinking as soon as we get to the top of the hill (not even a ¼ of a mile) the object is going to be right there in front of us. The object had completely vanished. We traveled about a ¼ of a mile down the road and could see it had traveled west about 5 miles in less than a minute. My next thought was it seemed to be over Rush Creek Elementary. I drove up to the school and had a great view for a long ways west. We saw the object but it had traveled as far west as we could see about another 5-10 miles. I proceeded to drive north on 101 until I got to County Rd 30 and took a left. And it just may be coincidence, but right after we made the turn there was a trooper sitting off the side of the road. We did see the o! bject again, but it was so far away there was no way we were g! oing to get close to it.

A few facts here; No Hot air Balloon is going to travel 5-10 miles west and turn around and return east the same distance if not more in the matter of a minute or less.

There were a lot of people that saw this. Anyone traveling on west 694 at this time of day saw this.

Hot air balloons can’t travel distances this thing did. This thing could travel 5 to 10 miles in less than a minute. I called the police department at 7:30 to see if anyone reported anything on this but the dispatcher said she just started working at 5:00 and had not heard anything.

This report was also filed with MUFON on the day it happened. We are meeting with an MUFON investigator on Saturday morning to try and recreate everything we saw.