SIGHTING: JEFFERSON CITY, MISSOURI (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"On January 19th, at approximately 6:45 pm., while we were standing on our back deck BBQing (east side of house), my youngest son noticed a large star-like object hovering in the north-east sky about one-half mile from our home. I was busy tending to our grill, when he hit my arm lightly and inquired to me as to what the object was. I quickly glanced up in the direction that he was looking, which my first reaction to it was that it was Jupiter; however I was taken a little aback, because I had just looked up in the sky in that general direction and the object was not there--it seemed to appear out of nowhere. He continued to watch the object for about a minute, when he hit my arm again and told me that it was moving. I made a much longer observation of the object, and as he had described to me, the object was moving around in slight movements that gave the appearance that it was slightly moving back and forth. The object was clearly below the cloud cover, because the bright intense white light was reflecting on the clouds above it in the darkness. We could see an airplane flying somewhat above this object, as described further to me by my son as "being above the clouds". We watched this object intently, as it then began to move slowly up into the cloud cover, and we could see that the object was pushing the clouds away from it as it moved diagonally up through the bank. The light was a very bright white and we could see the light from this object reflecting on the clouds as it pushed its way through the cloud bank. It continued diagonally up until it moved out of sight completely. Not wanting to assume anything, I remained outside for an additional 10 minutes until the clouds separated to get a clear view of all of the stars, so I could make a clear judgement on whether it was just a regular star, or Jupiter. There were no stars in the sky anywhere that resembled what my son and I witnessed just 10 minutes before. I waited for two more days to see when Jupiter raised off of the horizon, in order to get a better idea of Jupiter's position in the sky. The object appeared roughly 30 to 40 degrees to Jupiter's left, and the object was much higher in the sky than Jupiter at the same time of the evening. "