[Bender2]

In the summer of 2005, a friend and I were out late night fishing on Richland-Chambers Lake in Central Texas. This was just after the shuttle Discovery had separated from the space station on a mission STS-114. It was the first one after the Columbia loss. Both Discovery and the ISS were very visible in the sky that night. It was a wonder to watch them until they disappeared when they went out of sunlight and into the earth's shadow.

A little later, I looked up and saw another object above. It was not as bright as the shuttle or ISS. It looked for all purposes as a satellite in orbit. However, instead of a steady, straight trajectory as all the satellites I'd seen before in orbit, this one was juking all about moving in a rough northeast to southwest direction.

I told my friend to look up and he saw it, too. The UFO continued to juke around on a zigzag path as it travel across the sky for several minutes before it too disappeared as it went into Earth's shadow.

To this day, I wonder what it was I and my friend saw up there. It was not like anything else I've ever seen in the nighttime sky.

I can recall as a child watching Sputnik (actually it was the satellite's trailing booster rocket also in orbit) in the Fall of 1957. That bright pinpoint of white light marching across the sky in a steady, straight line is seared forever in my memory. Yet over the next 50 years, I have seen many other space payloads, but never another like that juking one of Summer, 2005.

Over the years I've thought often about what the devil the dang thing was and why was it doing that jitterbug dance?

My best guess was it was a military payload doing that juke dance as avoidance to any possible hunter/killer satellite, but that is not something I have ever been able to find in any articles about space warfare.

I cannot believe what I saw was an alien spacecraft chucked full of little green, gray or polka dot guys and/or gals here to steal our secrets, babies, ice, water, molybdenum, supermodels or our only working copy of the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator. It was not a scout for an invasion or a first cook sample tasting us before writing To Serve Man in his native tongue.

In truth, I do believe there is intelligent life out there in the universe. All those uncountable billions and billions and billions of galaxies and their googol (a 1 followed by 100 zeros) plus number of stars cannot help but over the billions of years since the Big Bang to produce several, if not, millions or billions of different intelligent lifeforms.

In my belief, they do not sit up nights worrying about us. I don't believe they are constantly coming here to watch us, but it would not be a life changing event for me if they showed up one day before I pass away.

Matter of fact... where are you guys? I want to know what that was I saw back in 2005 and I ain't getting any younger!!!

[Southack]

You may have seen a trash unit being ejected from the ISS (they fall and burn up in the atmosphere, but can move around quite a bit)...or perhaps one of the electrical experiments where the long “canvas” was eventually cut loose.

[yarddog]

During the Summer of 72 give or take a year or so, I was lying on a blanket with a girl looking at the stars. (Yes that is all we were doing).

I happened to see a satellite about as bright as a normal star, going across the heavens. I too noticed it seemed to be zig zagging. After watching it for maybe a minute, I realized it acutally wasn't doing the zig zag, it was an optical illusion.

[Inyo-Mono]

Incredible! I saw the same thing in ‘05 and always wondered what it was. I remember back in 1969, my brother and I were camping on the Mt. Whitney Trail (in the High Sierra of California) and from our tents saw a slow moving light in the night sky, as big and bright as the full moon. My brother thought it was like a scene from “Invaders from Mars” but two days later when we made it down the mountain to the town of Lone Pine, we found out that it was a Russian satellite reentering orbit.

[Kirkwood]

It is a well-known optical illusion that occurs with satellites that change their reflectance because they are tumbling. As they flicker in brightness, they appear to be moving in a zig-zag or jerky motion.

[Hunton Peck]

I saw something a bit similar to what you describe, while I was watching the leonid meteor shower around Thanksgiving of 2001, in northwestern Wisconsin. What I saw was a single point of red light moving slowly, yet erratically along a roughly north-south line. Because it was a single point, I couldn't be sure of distance, speed, or direction of travel. The difference is that my light would reverse course after, oh, ten minutes or so, and travel in the opposite direction. It kept doing this the whole time I was there.

One interesting fact is that, about 100 miles away from where I was, in the direction of this object, is the Navy's ELF radio transmitter near Clam Lake, WI (cue spooky theramin music).

I, too, still sometimes speculate about what that thing was.

[Atchafalaya]

Years ago (1969)I was cramming for a parasitology final with a classmate at his house. We took a break around 1 AM and went sit outside on his driveway in lawn chairs and were having a smoke. I saw overhead at my 2 a satellite passing R-L, NE-SW; I told Jerry look there is a satellite and he said that he’d seen it. When it got to our 10 it took a RIGHT, accelerated, and disappeared in less than 2 secs; a serious haul ass. I looked at him and asked did you see that and he replied yes. We talked about it for a few more minutes then went back to the books. That was my UFO experience. It was a 90 degree change in direction and acceleration that was simple but mind boggling to m to this day. I was smoking a Winston BTW./p>

[Moonman62]

I saw the Shuttle, Mir, and a third satellite all together about 10 years ago. The third satellite was known and in a similar inclination, but higher altitude. It was quite a sight.

Last Fall I saw two very bright satellites flying together. They didn't show up on any of the tracking sites, and they weren't the ISS or the Shuttle. It was about the same time that the Syrian nuke plant got blasted.

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

I think what you saw might have been the flight that delivered an alien Scientolotot to the couch-jumping Cruise and his next potential life partner, “’til divorce do us part,” Kat.

[AxelPaulsenJr]

A little later, I looked up and saw another object above. It was not as bright as the shuttle or ISS. It looked for all purposes as a satellite in orbit.

Could this have been what you saw?