Light over Tobay Beach, Massapequa, Town of Oyster Bay, NY

The report, as filed

I was driving, my partner sat in the passenger seat beside me. The sky was clear but there weren’t too many stars visible. Something caught my eye as we were talking: an oblong orange shape was suddenly visible in the sky in front of us, just left of center of our field of vision, maybe 30 degrees above the horizon. It gradually brightened as it appeared, like a slow flare, but constant in shape, speed, and utterly silent (the windows were down), and it traveled at a speed that, at the time and in recollection, seemed too fast to have been a plane or a drone, but far too slow to have been a meteor. It travelled upwards on a diagonal for maybe 5 seconds, give or take, before it gradually dimmed as it disappeared. I took the next turn-around and wondered aloud about the possibility of an aircraft practicing for the upcoming Memorial Day Air Show. My partner noted the time, 1:19 am, not an hour that one would expect such practice flights to take place. There were no other vehicles nearby. Object left no trail and the light source never blinked or flickered and had no discernible haze. Encounter was too brief to accurately estimate the object’s speed, size, or supposed distance from our vehicle, but we both got the sense that the object we had just seen was considerably larger than a drone, but likely smaller than a commercial jet. It certainly was not fireworks. I have not heard or seen any other reports on this event, though my resources are limited and I’ve never done this kind of thing before.

Held as-reported from National UFO Reporting Center (record NUFORC #175924). Witness text is preserved verbatim, including its spelling; nothing is edited beyond formatting.