Bright flashing "star" in sky

reply to post by CaLiDoN519


sober and no drugs involved, quite a bizzare thing to observe. Im wondering if my Dog attracted the ufo I have heard that animals and paranormal phenomena are related

I'm a new member from Iowa in the U S of A and have recently seen this unknown celestial sight. A friend and I witnessed it with our naked eyes around 4 am last Sunday morning. It was in the vicinity of Orion's Belt, flashed relatively bright blue, green, red and yellow (led vibrant) and appeared to move spontaneously in a circular motion too. Obviously our curiosity was peaked so we decided to do a little research and set up a telescope for Sunday night. I read numerous threads saying it's the star Sirius, or planet Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, or simply a satellite. I was on board with the Sirius explanation since it was in the right area of the sky and Sirius is known to be very impressive in color and brightness. We dismissed it's erratic movement to tired eyes. Anyways, Sunday night came and we got out in a pasture and had an unobstructed view of the majority of the sky. No clouds. Perfect. 11 o'clock or so we didn't see anything to the southeast so we turned around to look at the west sky and there was another flashing "star". Same exact characteristics except this one wasn't as bright. Within the 2 minutes in took to grab telescope and get set up again it had moved at least 3 finger widths from it's previous location and was starting to fade in and out in brightness. Then it was gone, like it was turned off, or something. No, it was not a plane. Well, there goes the Sirius explanation. It did not strike me as a craft of any sort. No other stars around it were scintillating so that's out. As far as I know it was too high off the horizon for the scintillation explanation anyways. We didn't get to see the eastern version do much more than break the horizon before my wife called and politely demanded I come home. In the little time we did get to see it we saw the same unnaturally vivid colors it had displayed the night before.(think led cop car lights with a couple extra colors thrown in) Anyways, I am no closer to a decent explanation of what these blinking, color changing things are up in the sky. Satellites possibly? Just seems strange that we can't find a solid piece of evidence supporting that....... If anyone has any good links or something to say that will expand my knowledge in regards to this subject, feel free to email me @ [email protected]. Later.

originally posted by: gringoman
I'm a new member from Iowa in the U S of A and have recently seen this unknown celestial sight. A friend and I witnessed it with our naked eyes around 4 am last Sunday morning. It was in the vicinity of Orion's Belt, flashed relatively bright blue, green, red and yellow (led vibrant) and appeared to move spontaneously in a circular motion too. Obviously our curiosity was peaked so we decided to do a little research and set up a telescope for Sunday night. I read numerous threads saying it's the star Sirius, or planet Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, or simply a satellite. I was on board with the Sirius explanation since it was in the right area of the sky and Sirius is known to be very impressive in color and brightness. We dismissed it's erratic movement to tired eyes. Anyways, Sunday night came and we got out in a pasture and had an unobstructed view of the majority of the sky. No clouds. Perfect. 11 o'clock or so we didn't see anything to the southeast so we turned around to look at the west sky and there was another flashing "star". Same exact characteristics except this one wasn't as bright. Within the 2 minutes in took to grab telescope and get set up again it had moved at least 3 finger widths from it's previous location and was starting to fade in and out in brightness. Then it was gone, like it was turned off, or something. No, it was not a plane. Well, there goes the Sirius explanation. It did not strike me as a craft of any sort. No other stars around it were scintillating so that's out. As far as I know it was too high off the horizon for the scintillation explanation anyways. We didn't get to see the eastern version do much more than break the horizon before my wife called and politely demanded I come home. In the little time we did get to see it we saw the same unnaturally vivid colors it had displayed the night before.(think led cop car lights with a couple extra colors thrown in) Anyways, I am no closer to a decent explanation of what these blinking, color changing things are up in the sky. Satellites possibly? Just seems strange that we can't find a solid piece of evidence supporting that....... If anyone has any good links or something to say that will expand my knowledge in regards to this subject, feel free to email me @ [email protected]. Later.

Iridium flare most likely.

Did it look like this?



Iridium Satellites often flare up in brightness spectacularly due to their highly reflective flat panels as they rotate.

Here's another video with two of them.

They often get reported by people less familiar with the night sky as UFOs.



Since you have a telescope you might want to check out the free software called Stellarium, to get an idea of what you're looking at in different parts of the sky: www.stellarium.org...

Hello im from idaho falls and I am wander in any of these occurences was the power shutting on and off? In my case the thing me and almost 8 other people saw was a odly shaped disc that almost apeared to have whips or tails comin off of it it flashed once ( colors in question are green blue majenta yellow purple pretty much the entire spectrum) and shut the power off the second time it flashed it turned the power on the third time it turned the power off and repeatedly flashe five time the fith time it happened to turn on the power and it was as if nothing had happened there was no sound and it was very very bright.