SIGHTING: CARBONDALE, ILLINOIS (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"Wife and I were sitting outside on the back deck of a cabin, we had just arrived and unpacked and were ready to relax. We were just talking and I noticed what appeared to be a pulsating satellite traversing the sky. I didn't think anything of it because I've seen that before. But then the object stopped suddenly. I said to my wife, "Did that satellite just stop moving?" Just as I was, she was perplexed and said, "Uh, yeah." She had noticed it, too. Then the object began flitting around the patch of sky where it was located. We continued watching for a good half an hour. Multiple times I focused on a star near it just in case it was some kind of optical illusion due to temperature variations in the atmosphere. However, the star I focused on appeared perfectly stationary while the other object continued to move randomly in the patch of sky. Eventually my wife went inside and within 20 to 30 seconds of when she did, the object quit pulsating for about three minutes before resuming it's previous activity. I watched for about another 10 minutes before finally accepting that I could not explain what I was seeing. In addition, the next night I made sure to look at the same patch of sky at the same time of the evening to see if there was any celestial object of similar brightness to what we had seen the night before. There was nothing. Finally, one last thing that was very odd, at roughly 3 a.m. the night after the sighting, a smoke or carbon monoxide detector began blasting in the cabin. As soon as I got up and out of bed to see what was going on it stopped. I have no idea what we saw the evening before."