2018-08-18 - Henderson, NV - Changing

Brilliant white light, morphed to clearly defined rectangular black shape, emitted misty tail, all vanished w/ no trace.

I was returning home from Arizona the evening of August 17, 2018, about 7:40PM PDT. I was driving north on I-11 (US93-95) and had just passed the Boulder City interchange when I noticed a brilliant light, WNW of my position about 35 degrees above the horizon. The light appeared to be approaching Black Mountain but was off in the distance, seemingly 10-20 miles away.

I immediately assumed that it was simply a jet on final into McCarran airport, since the jet traffic routinely make their final turns at Black Mountain. I glanced at it again about 30 seconds later and noticed that it hadn’t moved in any closer. Right then the light started to shimmer to a dull orange and went completely black and became a rectangular shaped black object, silhouetted against the dusk sky. Though the overall object appeared quite small (maybe 1/6 of a full moon) the corners of the rectangle were sharply defined.

I glanced back at it again periodically every few seconds while ! driving and noticed after another 30 seconds a milky tail start to come out of the black rectangular object and cover it in mist. Five seconds after that it had completely disappeared between my glances at it. No mist just gone. I would have assumed it was a meteor viewed face on, had it not been visible for almost 2 minutes in total.