SIGHTING: BONNEVILLE SALT FLATS, UT

Witness Testimony

"Object over Bonneville Salt FlatsI was driving eastbound on I-80 in Utah. At about 2:00 I was crossing the Bonneville Salt Flats and was about 1 to 1 1/2 mile from the eastern edge. The sky was basically clear with broken clouds at 30,000 feet. I looked to the left, north, and noticed an object in the sky. It was white and irregularly shaped. It was hard to tell with the clouds moving all around it if it was moving or not. I watched it as best I could while driving and lost sight of it for a moment when the freeway left the Flats. I looked for it again and found it. It appeared to be in the same position it was in when I first noticed it. I got off the freeway at a rest stop and got out of the car. The object was still there. It struck me how it vaguely resembled a Boeing “Pudgey Plane”, a caricature of a Boeing airliner that one sees from time to time, except it was all white. I found a spot where I could lean against a wall to see if it seemed to move and in the time I watched the object ! did not move. Clouds passed behind and above it, which suggested it was below 30,000 feet. I tried taking several pictures of it but the pictures didn’t really turn out. I could not see the viewfinder very well and was guessing a lot about how well in focus the picture was when I took it. Still, the object is in the pictures, just really, really fuzzy. Later on I tried to work out where the object was hovering, how high it was and how big it might be. I used simple triangulation from the point I first saw it and from the rest area. One map noted a military reservation on the salt flats and my triangulating put the object over the south end of the reservation. It was between 15 to 20 miles away and I guessed it occupied 2 degrees of sky. My arithmetic suggested it was 1,000 feet long, but, given how much estimating went into that, I’d be skeptical it was that big. I finally had to leave and it was still there when I left. It didn’t seem to be a balloon, it didn’t move like an airplane, it was too big to be a helicopter, so, what was it? "