Circle over Banner Elk, NC

The report, as filed

I was coming down the chair lift at Sugar Mountain Ski Resort at about 3:30 p.m. on Friday, July 4th. (The ski resort had opened its lifts to take visitors and mountain bikers to the top of the mountain and back down). The lift operators were spacing passengers out so my wife and daughter were several chairs in front and there wasn’t anyone behind me. I yelled to attract attention but no one was close enough to hear. Coming down from the top I saw a white ball or perfect circle moving on a straight line from left to right. It was difficult to tell the object’s height or size based on my perspective, but it appeared to about 6-feet across, perfectly round, and white and perhaps 50 to 100 feet above the trees on top of 5,236-foot mountain. This would be only a few hundred feet above the ground. It was a windy day and at first I thought it was some weather balloon broken loose but the wind was in my face and the object was moving left to right on a perfectly straight line at a constant speed---too fast for a bird, too slow for an airplane. It took about 30 seconds for the object to cross my limited field of vision as I descended to the base of the ski run. It seem to go into a cloud or perhaps was becoming smaller in the distance just as the tree line blocked my vision. I did not hear any reports of anyone else seeing it.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #111550). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.