Light over Rodeo, NM

The report, as filed

Looking to the east we saw the a very bright 2/3 moon (about 45 degrees above horizon) and Mars off to its right. It was not yet completely dark, but almost so; still some weak light in the west. It is important to note that the moon, Mars and only the very brightest of stars were visible at this time. A third extremely bright object was observed just to the left of the moon moving directly eastward. The object was >2x brighter than Mars, and it was white to amber in color and made no noise at all. We could not recognize any shape to the object due to its apparent high altitude. It proceeded silently to the east for several minutes and then disappeared in just a few seconds. Importantly, there were no blinking navigation lights of any kind observed; the object remained continuously luminous until it vanished. Due to its excessive brightness, the object did not appear to be a satellite, but I cannot entirely rule out that possibility. Later we did observe several satellites, which were uniformly very dim and hard to see due to the brightness of the moon. The "UFO" described above was only second in brightness to the moon!

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #127949). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.