2013-06-05 - Plummer, ID - Cylinder

silvery cylinder

I and my wife were walking across our back yard when I noticed an object of an opaque white color that if it were darker could have been perhaps flashing approximately 25-30 degrees above the horizon to our East/South East. I asked my wife if she could see it and she responded that she could. It was moving much like a leaf falling from a tree, but much slower, descending in altitude. We wondered if it could be a plastic grocery bag that had been lifted by a dust devil and then caught in a thermal updraft as can sometimes happen. Then it slowly stopped and appeared to hover. We wondered if it could be a weather balloon at this point.

Then it slowly made a looping maneuver and again appeared to hover in place for a few moments. At this point I asked my wife to run in and grab her birder binoculars so I could take a closer look if this thing wasn’t going anywhere. She ran into the house. During the time she was in the house the object began moving slowly to the! east. There is a church steeple in the field of view and the object passed behind that. I walked across our yard to get the view from the other side. The object appeared from behind the steeple slowly moving eastward toward a patch of fair weather cumulus cloud. My wife appeared at this time with the binoculars and I managed to get a glimpse of the object as it began to disappear behind these clouds. In the binoculars it appeared to me to be a tube or cylinder, silvery and sparkly in nature, perhaps with flashing lights running along its length, and it reminded me of a short flute.

Something else that was very interesting, but perhaps coincidental. There were two airliners flying in our field of view at altitude leaving contrails. As I searched and waited to see if the object would appear on the other side of the clouds, which it didn’t as far as I could tell, another smaller aircraft leaving a contrail was flying at twice the speed of the airliners out of the Northeast toward the area where I last saw the object enter the clouds. Could this have perhaps been a military aircraft attempting to intercept the object? I don’t know but found it very interesting. At this point the clouds closed in on the area of my observation and nothing else could be seen.

I am a non-traditional student approaching my degree, the founder and president of a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation and my wife is a special education paraprofessional.