SIGHTING: ST. PAUL, MN

Witness Testimony

"Fast shooting light through the clouds over Lake OwassoTwo of us were standing around a bonfire on the ice last Friday evening. There were quite a few ice fishermen out on Lake Owasso but most people were in their ice houses. The sky was cloudy as is typical in winter, except that the horizons were clear just a little over the tree tops. I was facing west and my buddy west/northwest. As we stood around talking, something caught my eye just above us and to the south. I looked up expecting to see a shooting star. Instead it was a green-ish/blue-ish egg shaped light streaking through the clouds. It lasted for about three seconds and then vanished. I initially thought that it was a shooting star because of the speed that the light moved across the sky. I immediately concluded that it was not a shooting star because the dense clouds overhead prohibited our view of any stars. Winter clouds in Minnesota are low to the ground and shooting stars occur high in the atmosphere.The light appeared to be the size of a large airplane (like a military cargo plane) but it was tough to gauge its size because it was hard to judge distance between the clouds and the ground.After initially thinking that the light was a shooting star, my next conclusion was that it was a flare. However, the light was much bigger than a flare, and was traveling horizontally at a constant rate and altitude. Flares also don’t travel as fast as a shooting star. The light also did not look like any flare that I’ve ever seen and was not red or white.The light was moving just inside of the clouds. I could see bits of cloud between myself and the light. This makes me think that it wasn’t a flash light, strobe, or other projection onto the clouds since that type of light would not penetrate the clouds. It would reflect off of the clouds and not appear to be inside of the clouds as this light happened to be. It also did not have any of the normal attributes of northern lights, and appeared in the sky just to the south of our position.There was no noise created by the light, no trail of clouds or exhaust, and it disappeared just before reaching a clearing in the clouds. I suppose that it could have been some sort of bright gas ball, but I’ve never seen anything like that before. This light shot through the clouds and seemed to have defined edges (egg-shaped). The light never changed direction, speed, or altitude that I could tell. It just vanished at a certain point.I can’t say that it was a craft of any sort because all that we saw was a fast moving light. Instantly though, we both knew that we had seen something odd. I don’t have an explanation for what we saw but can describe it quite well. My fishing buddy saw it for the last second or so and couldn’t come up with a good explanation for what we saw either."