SIGHTING: WATERTOWN, SOUTH DAKOTA (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"I was up on the roof of my house cleaning out the leafs from the gutters and had been doing it for about a half hour. It was a beautiful day for us in november, blue sky with almost no cloud cover. I climbed up to the apex of my roof to just take a break and lay down on my back and looked up at the sky as I was laying on my back.Directly above my line of sight I saw a white "dumbell" that was moving east. It was way, way up in the sky, and thus was quite small I would say slightly larger than you would see if you see a jet flying over at high altitude where you can still make out a perfect shape of the plane but it is still very small. I could cover the object with the tip of my little finger if I strechted out my hand to full length. Even though I initially saw the dumbell shape, I realized there is nothing that flies in the sky that is dumbell shaped so I kept watching it trying to figure out what it was. I thought it might be a white pelican as we have these around our area, though not this time of year. They fly very high, have about a six feet wingspan and when they fly high and soar on the thermals as high as they fly, you can still tell they are birds with the naked eye, can see the wings etc. from all the ones I have watched before. I quickly ruled out a bird, no flapping, this had a "bar" connected to two white spheres on either side of the bar and the bar was a perfect line, a bird would be thick in the center with smaller wings seen on each side. I thought could it be 2 white balloons somehow tied together and floating high in the air, but quickly discounted this as well because if it were two balloons connected, from the distance this thing was away from me, there would be no string or rope that one could see from that distance. Yet, I could clearly see a white horizontal line that had the same color white spheres on each end. The object was oriented perfectly horizontal with the bar parallel to the horizon and the spheres on either side, right and left. As the object moved at a rapid pace east, the object rotated clockwise slowly 90 degrees so the bar was perpendicular to the horizon and the spheres were facing up and down. It did not seem to rotate any more and seemed to stay in that orientation. There was no change in color, no sound, no pulsation, no metallic look or any change shape that I could tell. As far as the speed of this thing I stretched out my finger and followed it across the sky for about 20 seconds in a slow arc of my arm, until it dissappeared (not vanished) as it continued to move further away until it was not visible anymore. Nothing was emmitted from the object, no sound, no vapor trail etc. As I layed there for the next 15 minutes thinking of what I saw, I saw a jetliner above heading eastword and compared the size and speed of what I had seen to this jet. The relative size was just a hair larger than the jet was at its full altitude (can make out the jet shape) and the speed was about the same as I tracked it with my finger and arm. It was out of sight at about the same length of time as the object I saw. I remained calm as I saw this, and tried to be as objective as I could."