In a post this evening by Kandice Moore, featured on RaisinEmReal, her friend Annick Barrientes captured an object in the clouds photographed below.

“My friend was driving through Sumter, South Carolina near Shaw Air Force Base and captured this whatever it is in the clouds.  We have no idea what it is  and would love some feed back.  I’ve included the original photo and some enlargements.  Thanks.”

The object captured by Annick Barrientes may well be a reflection, as it is taken  from inside the car, yet there is nothing else reflected in the shot, thus it makes one consider that it may very well be a cylindrical UFO. Why do I think so?

Upon seeing the pictures it awakened my own memory of a sighting that my girlfriend and I experienced on the Full Moon evening after midnight on August 3rd, 2015. The sky was clear, star-filled, and beautiful.

At 12:24 AM, I noticed some movement in my peripheral vision. In the sky travelling from northwest of my downtown condo rooftop location towards the moon that was southeast of Toronto, was a subdued, almost shadow-like object. I pointed to the sky and asked my girlfriend:

“Do you see what I’m seeing?”

She immediately responded:

“It’s tumbling.”

I excitedly jumped in on her description and qualified her observation:

“Tumbling means it’s falling. This is not falling. It’s twirling on an even trajectory, spinning slowly clockwise!”

Here we are pointing at the cylinder slowly rotating clockwise surrounded by a light green and amber halo seen with my girlfriend next to me atop my Toronto downtown condo building. The full moon is in far upper right corner.                    Illustration © 2015 by Douglas Vanasselstine.

Alison asked:

“Is it a satellite?”

I said, “Satellites are orbiting at least 400-500 kilometers high (about 300 miles up). We can’t see them except as a dot of light passing by. But this is flying below the commercial jets overhead!”

The average jet cruise altitude is between 30,000 to 45,000 feet above mean sea level, or about 6 to 8.5 miles. With regular flight paths over the city, it is easy to observe that up until about 10,000 feet high, the commercial jets keep their bright frontal lights on after takeoff. Then beyond that altitude, they’re turned off. This object was below those commercial jets.

What we were seeing was a cylinder-shaped object twirling or spinning ever so slowly in a clockwise direction at an almost slow-motion momentum. It very much looked like the videos of a satellite rotating through space, yet close enough for us to see its shape and form with the naked eye. It was cylindrical and traveled within a larger halo of subdued light, slowly alternating between amber and green. It looked like the cylinder was a 4:1 ratio, possibly 5:1 of length to width.

Against fingers raised against the sky, it measured approximately 5-7mm and with the halo added was closer to 7-10 mm in diameter. The slowly rotating object was lower than the few scattered clouds.

I did not have a camera or phone, but I did have a very powerful astro-laser pointer that I use to point out the different constellations and stars as a hobby. So I immediately directed my green laser pointer at the cylinder passing overhead and hit it with the beam a number of times, much like I could see the laser hit the side of a building in the distance with a focused dot. The cylinder’s surface seemed like it was a reflective, metallic-like  surface judging by the green laser’s reflectiveness. I zapped the cylinder multiple times as it was moving in the direction of the moon. As it rotated silently across the sky towards the southeast direction of the full moon, the cylinder disappeared from view obscured by the moon’s brightness.

Both Alison and I saw this cylinder. Not only that, we both saw the powerful green laser pointer reflect off the object as it twirled slowly overhead. As if defying the laws of gravity and behaving more like an object floating in space, how can a cylinder-shaped object sustain itself in the sky below an altitude of 10,000 feet without aerodynamic wing design or standard jet propulsion?

This was a total mystery of high strangeness and the photographs below are the most similar objects I have seen to date, resembling the sighting I had in August 2015.

Copyright Sid Goldberg 2016 for Earth Mystery News.