Time: 10:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.
Hello, my family and I spotted a flying object flying almost exactly north, in the sky east of North Bend, Nebraska. The sighting took place on July 4th, 2010. My wife and I were lighting fireworks at her parents house when suddenly the people at the house started talking and pointing to the east. They called out to me, "what is that?" I saw a light moving far in the distance. Initially I thought it was a helicopter because the light seemed to flicker, like the flame of a candle.
However it was very high and very fast and the light seemed to be one of burning and not an electric halogen bulb like you see on modern aircraft. Additionally, there were no red and white strobe lights that are standard on regulation aircraft. It continued north (it had first been spotted to the southeast of us), and the light didn't really change as our perspective of it did as it passed (i.e., there was no dimming effect like you might get from headlights passing you).
It was flying quickly, at least the speed of a large helicopter or a plane. After a minute or so it was across the sky, and northeast of us, when it rather quickly faded out of sight entirely. This was surprising to us because we were seeing commercial jets far over head and could clearly make out their blinking red and white lights over an altitude of at least 15,000 feet.
The object appeared again about 15 to 20 minutes later, again in the southeast. It followed the exact same flight pattern as it had before, vanishing again in what we can say at best was the same spot as before.
A third and identical sighting took place roughly an hour after the first one. By the third time it came around, we had gone inside to get some binoculars. The object was difficult to focus on, but the characteristics of the light coming from the object was more akin to the flame of a candle than the steady shine of an electric source. But the object was very bright in the sky, brighter by at least 10-fold than even the brightest star or airplane. My father in law was able to track it in his binoculars, and describes that it seemed like a round object, like looking at a disc on its side or perhaps a sphere, with the burning light coming from around the perimeter of the circumference.
All in all, the sightings took place between 10:00 pm and 11:00 pm, US Central time.
There were 6 adults and 2 young children at that house, and we all saw it each time. After the third one, my father-in-law and I went next door to see if the neighbor had seen the same thing. She and her two grandsons had seen it during one of the fly-overs. She thought at first that it was a basket from a hot air balloon, saying that the light's quality made her think of the hot air generator present in such balloons. But she realized it was moving far too fast to be a balloon.
The object's trajectory was more or less level across the sky, except at the end it could possibly have been increasing altitude, but hard to say without any precise measurements.
The following day (July 5th), we communicated with some family who live in Wichita, Kansas, and they saw the same object flying in the same direction.
I am flabbergasted. I am a critical examiner with a scientific background, but I cannot explain this object (or these objects) that we all observed that night. It did not seem to be a standard commercial aircraft, the "flickering" characteristics of the light and the lack of accompanying strobe lights make it hard to see it being a standard aircraft. It could have been a military craft (such as a fighter jet with afterburners on or something?) but the duration and speed of the flight put that in question for me as well, not to mention the fact that this was July 4th, a Sunday as well as a national holiday, and I didn't expect military personnel to be conducting any flights during that time.
Moreover, this would have had to be an experimental aircraft, and I can't envision the military wanting to schedule test flights for a night when they know pretty much everyone will be outside looking up (due to the fireworks). Furthermore, usually when an aircraft passes by that quickly at that short of a distance (the light was VERY intense so we don't imagine it could have been far if it were the size of a typical aircraft), we would have heard a sound at some point. We heard nothing except the distant popping of fireworks.
Unfortunately we did not get any pictures or video of the light, but from reading your site (which we found through Google after searching to see if anyone else had seen this thing), it sounds like several other people throughout the midwest saw similar things in the sky that night.
I'd love some answers. I'm no aviator and certainly not a UFO enthusiast. I've always heard stories of rural UFO sightings and dismissed them as the uneducated giving extraordinary explanations for phenomena they can't explain. Well, I am an educated scientific man, and I cannot explain what we saw that night, nor can I explain why our relatives who are some 300 miles south of us saw the same thing at the same time. Thanks.
If you have seen anything like this in the same area please be kind enough to contact Brian Vike at: sighting@telus.net with the details of your sighting. All personal information is kept confidential.
Sightings.com website: http://www.sightings.com/
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