Cylinder over Niederwald, TX

The report, as filed

I was taking a break from making planters at my friend's house on her back porch when I decided to take a break. Looking out and at the sky over my friends yard, I noticed what I thought was a strange, shaped bright cloud. It looked to be less than a mile away. I watched it for about 5 minutes and not seeing it dissipate, and because there were no other clouds this day, it didn't make sense to see this one. I called out to my friend, to have her look to see what she thought it might be. We could see it but we couldn't make out anything but a bright light. We walked to the end of her yard at her fenceline, about an acre sized yard, then I ran to get the binoculars so we could see it better. Looking through the binoculars I saw this white object with pink and blue lights encasing it. Like a halo around it. It appeared to be hovering, and moving away very slowly in the sky and was tilted about 20-30° angle towards the left the whole time we saw it. We called out for her roommate to see what he thought it might be and so he wouldnt think we were crazy. This was probably 10 minutes after I first saw it. We took turns watching this through the binoculars. At one point I was looking through them, for a split second I saw a ball of light appear to go into this white object and then I saw it disappeared and the shape of the object was visible again.. I grabbed my phone at my friend's suggestion and took a picture at 8:02pm. At about 8:05pm we thought we would try to get closer for a better picture, so we got in her car and drove down the road, but didn't see it from there so after a vpl of minutes looking in that direction, we gave up drove back to her house and looked in the same area, but we couldn't see it anymore. No sound that we could hear, no trails left like a plane, as we did see a few off to the left that had left trails that lasted only seconds. It was a warm day. This was not a plane, nor anything we've ever seen before. It moved very slow and methodically in the sky. Visible to the eye with much better details through the binoculars. What prompted me to make a report, a few days later I read about cow mutilations in the counties nearby. [NUFORC annotation: Contrail - Possible]

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #175553). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.