2020-02-01 - Nampa, ID - Light

Orange light in the sky over Nampa

As my husband and I were headed toward home this evening, we were driving south, on a lane that is straight south of I84, in Nampa, ID. I noticed, in the southeastern sky, a fairly bright, fairly large orange light moving at the same rate of speed a small airplane would fly. We were driving northeast of the small Nampa Airport and when I first noticed the light I thought it was most likely a small plane, except for the color of the light which seemed odd. I pointed it out to my husband and I asked, "what is that?" We then realized it could not be an actual airplane because it only had a single, steady light on it, and that light was very orange; orange and bright, like a glowing barbecue coal. We pulled over and watched as it flew across in front of us, below the Moon, heading NW, and I then looked out my window toward the west and watched it...when it got directly across from us it seemed that I could see some sort of squarish structure or hazy ar! ea?? below it but the structure was so faint I couldn't tell what I was seeing. I rolled my window down and my husband opened the cars sunroof and we could hear absolutely no sound from this object. It then promptly dimmed and went out.

I can't be sure if it actually dimmed or if it went into a slight cloud cover in the NW sky. We continued home, which was less than a quarter of a mile away, and when we got in the house I looked at our weather station to see which direction the wind was blowing and the wind was SSW 5, which meant this was not something that was blowing in the wind because if it had been it should have been flying to the Northeast and not the northwest. And it definitely seemed to be self propelled, by the steady rate of speed it appeared to have. We watched it for a total of about a minute before it dimmed and disappeared.