Sunday, November 18, 2018
North Phoenix, Arizona
( Between 5:50am and 6:30am)
Weather, partly cloudy. 51 degrees.
It was on the final night of the Leonid meteor shower, during the peak, just before dawn. I was in the backyard of our North Phoenix home during those hours, I had my camera set up and was recording the sky, searching for shooting stars.
Deer Valley Airport is under two miles from me and I could tell that it was beginning to wake up with it’s typical morning activity.
I’ve been watching the sky for many years and am familiar with the various aircraft and spacecraft seen moving through the sky.
Low in the northern sky, I spotted a blinking light in the distance that was slowly moving towards me. At first, I thought that it was a plane at high altitude, I’ve seen many of those over the years, but then I soon realized that light wasn’t blinking like the typical aircraft strobe lights, this light was blinking erratically. I could see no other navigation lighting on this craft.
It was to long before I noticed that this light wasn’t moving like a high altitude aircraft, space debris or satellite
The object moved very slowly at first, it then seeming would speed up then slowed down again. The video shows the object moving through the sky to a point above my head for a period of close to eight minutes.
As the object continued, I noticed other blinking lights moving in various areas of the sky.
The light moved into a bank of wispy clouds covering a part of Ursa Major and seemed to hover there, still blinking erratically, slowly fading to nothingness a few moments later.
The edited points of the video are where I had to cut out some of the camera adjustment as the object’s forward motion was pushing it out of frame. The falling water sounds are from a water feature that was adjacent to me, next to the patio.
Check out my blog post: http://www.cactuspix.com/purethoughtsblog/strange-light-amongst-the-leonids/
Rod is a blogger, writer, filmmaker, photographer, daydreamer who likes to cook. Rod produces and directs the web series, CUPIC: Diary of an Investigator. He is also the editor, producer and administrator of STM Daily News, a part of the TNC Network.