Yesterday we were driving home from Arkansas around 2:00 pm. Heading southbound, I saw in the sky a long, white, two-tailed streak. I didn’t think much about it then, assuming it was likely just a jet or something. Fast forward about three hours.
Now we’re heading westbound on the interstate when I look over to the south and see what I’m fairly certain is the same object. It was orange this time, still had two distinct tails, and looked earthbound from my perspective. We were able to see it for at least fifteen minutes until the trees blocked our view, and the next time we had a clear line of sight, it was gone.
So, what did we see that was large enough to burn up in our atmosphere for that long?
The miliatry has opened some flying lanes for the holiday. Was it a low orbit jet with it’s two tails from the engines? Or when you say two tails are you talking about physical parts of the fuselage?
Except it was orange, as if it were burning up. That’s about the direction it was heading, too (maybe a little closer to five o’clock than six, though).
Definitely not a streetlight. Too high in the sky, too far away, and in a part of Texas where there’s nothing around.
Correct. My default assumption is that it was a comet. The part that confuses me is that it looked so big that I couldn’t imagine something that huge landing and not causing massive damage.
Well if it was indeed a comet it probably would be on the news I would think…if it was a burning up large satellite it wouldn’t have made the news. But I didn’t think satellites burned up for 15 minutes. I mean when Columbia burned up that took some time, and the footage of that is here
Yeah, a little bit. It was more orange, but that could’ve been because it was close to sunset. I didn’t even think about a satellite. That makes more sense than a large comet.
Well my money is on satellite. I’ve seen large things burn up in the desert sky with no light pollution - I’ve seen them go horizon to horizon and I know it was a huge rock coming into the atmosphere. Satellites and such tend to go much slower as they are usually much less heavy, so I’d bet it was a satellite. Or of course, we could be hours away from being assimilated.
I don’t think it would be a satellite, at least not one in LEO – its visibility would be measurable in seconds, not three hours. And if the satellite was in geosynchronous orbit, it wouldn’t burn up at all. The only logical LEO explanation would be if DeadlyAccurate saw two different “burning up” objects that night, which seems improbable.
DeadlyAccurate – if I read your account correctly, you observed the object(s) in the daytime, right?
Based on the description, I’m going to guess that you saw some horesetail and/or cirrus clouds. Whether the ones you saw 3 hours after the first sighting is unlikely, but the right weather pattern could produce the same type of clouds for a few hours repeatedly. The fact that the second sighting was orange was probably due to the time (which, 3 hours later, would have been about 5PM). The clouds would have been lighted from below by the setting sun.
White during the day and orange in the evening sounds like clouds. Cirrus clouds would reflect the sun after it has set in your area (due to altitude) and the color would be orange.