SIGHTING: MESQUITE, TEXAS (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"I was in my swimming pool and noticed an object high in the sky above me. I am an aviation nut and notice most things in the sky. I'm always looking up. I didn't know what the object was when I first saw it. Once I saw it. I got dried off and went inside as quickly as I could to get me Nikon Camera with 300mm zoom lense. I started snapping photos and took a short video as well. I knew that it was not an airplane, helicopter, blimp, or hot air balloon. Sky was clear except for some high cumulostratus clouds. This object was below these clouds. I estimate them being at 30 to 40 thousand feet. Winds aloft were at 290 degree at 50 knots at the time of viewing. This object did not move ESE as the cloud did. It pretty much hovered and might have moved slightly north from the south. The object was viewed near sunset and I viewed it until I could no longer see it. I breifly looked a way and could not find it again. It got fainter and fainter the darker it got. That lead me to believe that is was ascending. My wife, sister, brother-in-law all, father-in-law, and mother all saw it. My brother-in-law and I kept going back and forth about it being a weather balloon. I decided it couldn't be one because it was not moving with the clouds. I'm a private pilot and researched winds aloft after taking photos and my brother-in-law's weather balloon therory didn't add up to me. I thought is could have possibly been a planet. Venus would have been the only thing that I thought it could have been. I pulled out Google Sky Map on my phone and venus was setting to west with the sun. No other planets near this object. In my video I can see the object under clouds. The images Im submitting have been cropped and are from my Nikon D5100 with 300MM zoom."