This my facebook post about it, verbatim. the post and further discussion is at https://www.Facebook.Com/mark.Holtz.794/posts/1246135242236994 one correction i would make to that original post... i no longer believe that it was necessarily below a cloud layer. the clouds were so thin, i think a light this bright could easily have shone through them. also, i had no watch, just my phone, so i had no accurate way to measure seconds. i counted my breaths, and then after it disappeared, used my cell phone to measure off one minute and counted my respiration rate. then divided the number of breaths i took while observing the object to roughly calculate the elapsed time. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ i don't quite know how to put this, but... i believe i've just seen a ufo. well, technically, i definitely saw a ufo, because it was a flying object and i could not identify it. but i'm looking for ideas on what it might have been. at about 8:30 local time in central kentucky, i took a walk down to the cvs pharmacy a half a mile away. at 8:52, on my way home, i turned the corner onto our street and proceeded in a westerly direction toward our house. at that moment, i saw a glowing, orange object that appeared to be rather large and apparently moving very rapidly at a low altitude, on a bearing of about 75 to 80 degrees (just a little bit northerly of due east). it passed almost directly over my head, moving in a perfectly straight line, and it was totally silent. there was no sound at all, of any kind, from the object, although i could clearly hear traffic noise from a half mile away. it was a quiet night, and sound was carrying very well, but... there was none from this object. the total elapsed time to transit the entire sky, from one horizon to the other, i would estimate at about 40 seconds, so it was covering sky at a pretty quick pace. i can not estimate the apparent size in terms of how much arc it covered, because i don't know how to do that. but i did take a ballpoint pen (a parker classic) out of my pocket and hold it up for comparison; the diameter of the object was closely equivalent to the width of the pen. the object was just slightly smaller in diameter than the thickness of the pen held at arm's length. the color of the light was very odd; i've never seen anything quite like it before. first of all, there were no red, green, or white navigation lights, and nothing was blinking or flashing. it was mostly bright orange, with a reddish tint, very much like the glowing tip of a cigarette. it flickered slightly, like a flame, ad there was also a hint of yellow in the edges of the light as it flickered. as it passed over me, i ran down the possibilities, and had pretty much decided it must be some sort of meteor or something. but as i watched it approach the eastern horizon, fully expecting it to just vanish over the horizon, it did something strange. it was very small in terms of apparent size at that point, and seemed to be slowing down in terms of its relative velocity - which would not be unexpected in an object moving at a steady speed directly away and now at a great distance. but as i watched, it appeared that it actually had, indeed slowed way down; it seemed to almost hover or float, and then moved upward relative to my line of sight. it's apparent speed was slow at first, but over the space of a few seconds, it sped up fairly quickly, and curved to the right (southward) as it rose. it was very small by that point, and quite a considerable distance away. at that point, it disappeared behind some buildings, and i did not see it again. this is all i know. i don't believe it was a satellite of any sort, because it was 3 hours after sunset, and any earth-orbiting satellite close enough to be that bright would have been far too deep in the earth's shadow by then. it did behave a lot like the iss does when we go outside to look at it, but it was larger and the wrong color - bright orange is not the right color for a satellite that reflects sunlight. i was initially unable to estimate speed, size, or altitude with any degree of confidence, because without at least some benchmark reference point for at least one of those three values, there is no way to calculate the other two. but i just realized a short time ago that there were some clouds in the area, but at no time did it appear to be obscured. i checked an aviation website, and found that the ceiling in this area is consistent between 3500 and 5000 feet tonight. so, it was below a mile, about the apparent diameter of a pen barrel, and took about 35 to 40 seconds to transit the sky from one horizon to another. can anyone tell anything about its physical characteristics from those data points? anyone have any ideas on this? could it have been a drone - are they that silent? bruce charles wenger, are you seeing this? you''re an expert at aircraft identification, aren't you? anyone have any thoughts? ================================ oh, and also.... it was so hard to be certain of the shape, because dark. it's like when you see a car coming at night - all you can make out is a blob of light. i couldn't make out a distinct shape, just a fuzzy blob of orange light. i did get the impression that it was somewhat "compressed," in the sense that the width was slightly greater than the length along the axis, but that impression was so slight, it could easily have been a trick of the eye - the mind's eye seeing a rapidly moving object and trying to define a shape by analyzing the apparent speed. in many ways, it did resemble a fireball. i had almost concluded it had to be a meteor of some sort, right up until the last few seconds, when it slowed down and then curved up and to the right. but in retrospect, i think a meteor just wouldn't have fit the observed physical properties. in many ways, it looked like a night time version of the great montana fireball, which is shown in the video at the bottom of the post. it put me very much in mind of that video. but the physics were wrong. my best guess is that it was visible for at least 30 to 40 seconds, and it didn't seem to change at all in brightness or apparent size. but if it was a fireball in the atmosphere, it would have been losing mass the entire time, which - over the space of 40 seconds or so - seems as though it almost certainly would have caused changes in the brightness or apparent size. that's a really long time... even the montana fireball only last about 10 or 15 seconds before skipping off the atmosphere and streaking back into space. but all that aside, yes - if you look at this video, what i saw looked very much like a smaller, slower version of this. if that fireball had been filmed at night, it probably would have looked a lot like this. assuming bright orange is the right color for an atmosphere-skipping asteroid. if there was a smoke trail, i couldn't have seen it in the dark. https://www.Youtube.Com/watch?V=kcsj6e8s5la