2022-02-11 - Franklin, VA - Circle

Roundish object spotted moving in a steady, straight line. Very high up in the sky. No contrail, no wings. Disappeared unexpectedly.

My daughter and I were taking a walk on a dead-end road that runs behind our home in rural Southampton County a few hours ago. Beautiful warm day, slightly windy, and blue skies. Little wisps of clouds here and there, but mostly clear. The road we walk on has trees along each side of the road here and there, but the area we spotted this object in was right above our heads with an unobstructed view. About five minutes into our walk my daughter, who is slightly behind me, says, "What is that?". I turned to look at her, and she was pointing up in the sky. I looked up and spotted what to me looked like a round object at a great distance in the sky, almost directly above us. It looked white-ish in color and was clearly moving. I think the direction it was heading was south. It didn't appear to be lit-up/illuminated. My first thought was that maybe it was a bag, or balloon, that was caught way up there in the wind somehow. However, I'm certain it wasn't since it was moving in a perfect straight line, no wobbling or bobbing, and moving at a steady clip in the same direct line. It was clearly moving, but it wasn't zooming along at a super-fast speed either. It's distance in the sky was very high—I can only say it was higher than any bird I've seen fly, and low enough we would have seen wings had it been an airplane. Neither of us saw airplane wings or tail, and there was absolutely no contrail behind it. We see planes all the time when we walk. We saw several today after our sighting. (We have been walking this road for almost five years now and have never seen anything out of the ordinary.) So, I was studying this object for a good minute, trying to understand what I was looking at, and saw no wings, no tail, and more importantly, no contrail at all. It was moving at a steady pace in the same direction, and I decided to try to get a picture of it on my cell. I looked away for roughly 10-15 seconds to open my camera app. Apparently, my daughter took her eyes off it for a few seconds as well, because I hear her say, “Where did it go?? I don’t see it!”. I immediately looked up, figuring it was probably further along and she was just having trouble putting her eyes on it. I tried to spot it but was unable to. I looked all over the sky, and it was nowhere to be seen. Based on its speed, I am certain of about how far along it should have been based on how long I looked away, but there was nothing to find. The sky was clear where we were looking, so no way it could have blended in with the clouds. All I know is there is no way possible it had enough time, moving at the speed it was going, to clear our area and get completely beyond our view, in that amount of time. The rest of the walk we kept an eye out, but never saw it again. We saw several planes, at varying heights in the sky, and all were immediately recognizable for what they were—and all had contrails! I asked my daughter her observations about what we had seen, and we agreed on all points except one slight variation in her perception of the shape of the object. To me it was round-ish (it was too far away for me to tell if it was perfectly round). My daughter said that while she agrees it looked round-ish as well, to her it looked like ‘a fat arrowhead’. Her words. Her eyes are a lot younger than my own, so I’m assuming she could probably see it a shade better than I could.