2012-10-16 - Englewood, FL - Light

Slowly flashing white light in space or possibly low earth orbit.

I stepped out onto my front deck to smoke at right around 3:00 Am. We live on the Gulf of Mexico in a beachfront home so there is less light making the stars seem to stand out more than other cities I've lived in, so when I smoke at night I always stare straight up at the stars. Almost right away, I noticed a bright, white light flash one time out of the corner of my eye. I tried to focus without blinking on the area that the flash seemed to originate from and waited. Finally after what seemed like an eternity, I saw it again! Only this time, I was looking right at it when it flashed. The light was so far up, that it appeared to be a star. It appeared to be stationery at first, and was located near the Southwest corner of the constellation Orion. After the second flash, I pulled up the stop watch application on my smartphone and began to time the spacing between flashes. To the best of my ability, I timed it to exactly 7 seconds between flashes.

I went inside quickly to ask my Fiancee if she would get out of bed and come outside to look at this light. Luckily, she wasn't mad at me for waking her because we had seen the same sort of light last winter in the same exact location in the sky. The only difference is the last time, the light flashed twice and was gone. The skies were completely clear, on both occasions, and the light was so far away, the only way I can think to describe it is by comparing it to a star, that only shines for a half second every 7 seconds.

The only thing that makes this worth reporting, is the incredible altitude at which it appeared to be coming from. I truly believe this object was in either low earth orbit, or in space. After watching the object and timing the frequency of the flashing for some time, I began to realize that it was actually moving, just very, very slow. After around 15 minutes, the object had moved a little less than the distance between the star furthest to the right of Orion's belt, and the center star in Orion's belt. Although it was actually located off of the Southwest corner of Orion, the distance between the stars in Orion's belt was the closest point of reference in determining the distance of travel. And given the very short distance the object travelled over a 15 minute period, this to me, has to be something other than an aircraft because I have never in my entire life seen an aircraft even half that high, and never have I seen an airplane that could fly that slow.

The other thing that made me report this sighting, is the very slow, 7 second interval at which the light was flashing. All the aircraft I have seen have marker lights and a strobe light. Whatever this was not only had no marker lights, but you could hardly consider this light a strobe purely because the period between flashes was so long, and the strangest fact of all, the fact that after about 15 minutes, it simply vanished and did not reappear. And since the sky was perfectly clear and I could see every star and planet in the sky, the object could not have been obscured by a cloud. I hope someone can look into this and check weather radar, air traffic radar, and find out if it could have been a satellite of some kind, or possibly even some military drone or experimental aircraft.