2018-03-31 - Eugene, OR - Flash

My neighbor and I were standing in front of my garage talking, about 10:45pm, Saturday night, March 31st, when I looked up about 60deg up WNW above the trees across the street and noticed a bright white flash about -4.0mag. Thinking it was possibly the ISS coming over, I told my neighbor to look also, but about 4 seconds later, we saw a much smaller flash about 2.0mag followed 6 seconds later by another brighter flash as the object moved very slowly from WNW toward the E.

I went inside and grabbed binoculars while my neighbor tried to capture it on his Android phone.

When I looked at it through the binoculars I realized it was actually two objects! One following the other and both flashing at irregular intervals. After watching them move slowly across the sky, the brighter one suddenly TURNED SOUTH, continuing to flash every 6-12 seconds for about 30 secs before disappearing.

Never seen anything like that happen before.

The dimmer object continued E also flashing at odd intervals until it moved past 90deg above us and began quickly fading as if it was going into the earths shadow.

First thought was it might have been the Tiangong-1 space station, but a quick check online showed it nowhere near our latitude.

A check of the satellite databases showed no objects matching the magnitude, altitude or azimuth observed for the time frame.

Whatever they were they appeared to be very high altitude, possibly tumbling and moving very, very slowly compared to satellites or aircraft.

Observer #1 has been an astro-imager and satellite tracker for 15yrs+, an aviation enthusiast for over 40 yrs, and has seen a lot of strange looking, but easily explainable, things in the sky. These were VERY odd objects indeed!!

Observer #2 has had one other observation of different unknown objects 3 1/2 years ago about 2 miles from this location.


((NUFORC Note: Possibly tumbling space debris, giving off intermittent reflections of the Sun?? PD))