I Saw A UFO, Can Someone Explain What It Was?

Alright this happened a good month ago. I am located in southeast Texas, at around 7pm there was a silver whitish round object in the southern sky about the size of a large star. The clouds wouldn't cover it up as they went by.

It moved veery slowly towards the east and was eastbound at around 8pm. I understand that satellites and the space station move too fast for this, planets move slower than this, it was not dark until 9-9:30 and stars were hardly visible by 9:30. It wasn't Jupiter. What was this?

It could have just been a high flying aircraft, but probably a satellite. Stuff that looks like stars should only spark your interests if its zipping across the sky, stopping, doing figure 8's and darting out of sight. Something that just defies all that you know about physics.

[edit on 25-7-2008 by Dronetek]

This thing was in no way an airplane, it was way above the clouds and never moved, the only way I nknew it moved wa by checking every couple minutes from one area, very very slow. No passenger jet at 30000 feet no contrail, no helicopter for sure.

Utilize www.heavens-above.com. They won't take donations -- they are self-funded by avertisements. You can plug in your location and always know what is flying above you, or in sight, that is a KNOWN object. If you see linear lights that aren't reflected by the site, you can still ask them, and they will tell you, IF it is a known object.

Objects that fall outside of this site are UFOs, in that they are not identified. Happy 'seeing'.

Cheers

p.s. objects that change direction should be photographed and shared. EVERY single known satellite-like object maintains a consistent orbital path.

Thanks for the link, I'll use it for future sightings, I would post the image I got from my 6.0 mega pixal digital camera, but it was so far away it didnt catch it. I have seen palnets before but they are very slow and take hours to move that distance, and satellites are very fast from what I know

reply to post by starvingartist


Yes. You can even anticipating views of various satellites using the link. If you click on the date, and then click on the map, it will even show you direction and times of the object. I'm not trying to say that what you saw was a satellite or known object, but I do think that the scientific process requires one to rule out the known objects first.

I and my Bride have seen things twice in the 14 years since we've lived in the Cayman Islands that didn't conform to known objects. They were there, then gone. We didn't take any video -- the situation didn't allow for it, and so it goes. Also, alcohol was involved in the first "sighting" and that, by it's very nature, alters the veracity of the event.

Keep watching, and carry your camera with you everywhere. It's what I do. I keep an extra memory card in the case, as well as a spare battery. Someday..........

I saw something like that in south east Ireland last weekend - i took a video of it on my phone but the quality is not great. I have seen satellites during clear, full moon nights before and this was moving a too fast to be a satellite, it moved completely across the sky in about 2 minutes.
And it wasn't blinking so it couldn't have been a plane or helicopter. Weird!

argentus is correct, this was probably a satellite.

There does seem to be some confusion here about how fast satellites travel across the sky. The answer is that some are very slow, and some can be fast, up to about 10 km/s (about as fast as the slowest meteors). These can cross from one horizon to the opposite in well under a minute.

If you watch the sky enough you will see all kinds of stuff in orbit up there, from randomly glinting junk to flaring Iridiums and tri-spy-satellite formations... and so much more!

For it to be classed as a UFO, IMHO, it should either change direction or speed, unless there is some other extremely unusual aspect to it (eg. it blots out half the sky).

I never said it was a deth star or enterprise, it was a ufo to me,if it was a satellite it was moving slightly faster than the earth. I look at the sky every night and have yet to see anything like it. When I was young I also saw a light traveling very fast from west to east in about 10 seconds, then it stopped completely and then went west again very bizarre. I will keep looking and hopefully when I see it again it will be closer for my camera to pick it up. I do agree with a lot of weird stuff in the sky, I wish people looked at the sky more often, think about it, how often do people ever look up, I havent today.

Fair points starvingartist. I was not having a go at you for posting this, and asking what it was. Just wanted to point out that allot of the strange things you can see in the night sky are caused by relatively well observed and understood objects. Not everything, but I do think in your case it could be attributed to something of Earthly origin