2014-10-28 - Albany, OR - Changing

Illuminated object moving south, stopped in sky over Albany

The morning of Tuesday October 28th at 10:10am I was driving down SW Queen Avenue going west. I was on my way to a college recitation and had volunteering to drop my boyfriend off near his place of employment before I left town. After dropping him off and turning onto Queen Ave from a parking lot that crosses with SE Hill Street I noticed something extremely bright in the sky. As I was moving west down Queen, the object was moving from the north to south.

At first glance, I thought the object I was looking at must be a plane. The reasoning for this was because of a nearby airport, as well as how low the object seemed to be relative to the altitude that planes fly at when they have completed their ascent. The object also appeared to be moving at a rate comparable to that of an airplane. What compelled me to keep staring what the unbelievable brightness of the object. Initially I thought that it may be reflecting the light from the clouds which were bright that morning. The longer I stared at it, the stranger it seemed that there appeared no colored lights on the object. I also began to notice that the object at first glance had appeared to be plane shape, but the longer I watched it move through the sky the more I was able to define that it appeared, in fact, as a crescent shape with its widest diameter parallel with the ground.

Once I began to realize how out of sync this object was with what I am accustomed to seeing from a plane, I followed it's trajectory with my eyes as I continued to make my way west on Queen. Next something very strange happened. The object I had been watching moved in front of clouds that were much darker, gray color. It was then I saw that the light didn't seem to be reflecting onto the object from the clouds, but coming from the object itself. The best way to describe it, was that it appeared to be self-illuminated. The color was a very bright white color.

The object moved west from my perspective. A few moments later object stopped moving entirely. It was suspended in the sky, and no longer appeared crescent like it had when it was closer to me, but appeared orb-shaped. The only thing I can compare it to is a star. It looked like a low hanging star in our atmosphere in the middle of the morning. After a five to ten second stillness, the object moved at a much, much faster rate west, or backwards from where I was staring. The movement of the object at this point was unfamiliar to me, and the best way I can describe it was like it had moved at warp speed and now was the size of a needle pinhead in the sky. It was then that I turned north onto Pacific Avenue from Queen and was unable to further locate the object in the sky.