Cylinder over Lakeville, NY
A witness account on file, unevaluated. Most of the archive rests here, and honestly so.
The report, as filed
I was out in the country last weekend in Western New York State: between Geneseo and Lakeville, on the Western shore of Conesus Lake. At approximately 1:45 a.m. on Sunday, June 8, I saw an object go streaking across the sky – extremely fast, much faster than a plane. Although the trajectory looked like a satellite – very smooth and straight from east/southeast to west – it seemed quite close to the earth and flashed at regular intervals. The flashes were equal in intensity and strobe-like. The object disappeared between flashes and I was able to track it across the sky from flash to flash. I saw 4 or 5 flashes in all before it was out of my view. The flashes were white with another color (can't recall exactly what color). I would say the object was possibly rectangular or cylindrical. The whole episode lasted maybe 5 seconds to cross my entire field of view. Fast! I’ve briefly researched satellites and this sounds like a “tumbling” satellite, but seems that mine was going too fast for that. Or maybe it was close to Earth and that explains why it seemed to be so fast? I have seen one satellite in the past, from deep in the Grand Canyon, and that one was much tinier, fainter, steady (not flashing), and took longer to cross the sky. I am very curious as to what I saw. Perhaps it was some other sort of satellite? I don't think it was iridium as the iridium flash description I have read does not match what I saw. About me: I am a lover of the night sky with little technical knowledge. I live in the suburb of a large city so it is not often that I am in a dark enough place to really enjoy the stars. I have witnessed two meteor fireballs in my lifetime (one in the Grand Canyon), many asteroids, and one satellite. At heart I am a scientist and just wish I knew what that was. Thank you.
Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #110134). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.
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Routed to: Federal Aviation Administration · records window 2014-06-05 → 2014-06-22
From the same sky
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July 3, 2017 · 7:00 PM · SPHERE
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In daylight, through a 6" Celestron Star Hopper telescope, we viewed a very slow moving sphere. The sphere appeared to be in orbit considering it moved out of view of my telescope about as fast as Saturn would. The object was visible by the naked eye, but it looked like a star, and you couldn't see its form. From the view of the telescope, the sphere had a skinny extension that was roughly 6 times the length of the sphere with a second much smaller sphere mounted to the opposite end. The larger sphere was stationary while the extension and rotated wildly around it. The rotational pattern held a consistent speed, but was inconsistent in direction. The only visible color was white. The object held a very stationary position in the sky. It was seen directly overhead, and traveled about 15 degrees south before disappearing. We viewed the object for approximately 10 minutes, and it was easy to keep it in the viewfinder of my telescope. This was just before the Canisius Lake "Ring of Fire" 3rd of July event where all lake residents light road flares on their lake front property and light off fire works.