SIGHTING: UNDISCLOSED, UTAH (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"After work at around 7:30 I went to get mail on Goldenrod Way in Harvest Hills subdivision. It was already totally dark and as I was walking back to the house I looked up at aircraft ( as I often do, because I'm a pilot ) and observed an aircraft that appeared to be on ILS approach to SLC runway 34R but it was a bit too far to the right of where the localizer should be. I then started turning in a slow turn to the right until it was going over the Wasatch mountain or pretty close ( about over Pleasant Grove ) in a more southerly or southeasterly direction. I saw one white strobe and several unblinking white lights but was unable to discern a shape to it. But it looked about as big and the passenger jets that fly the approach. Landing from the south is the norm for KSLC unless the wind dictates otherwise, so I see a large number of large transport category aircraft over my house all the time. Strange thing was I saw no nav lights or rotating red beacons. I'm very familiar with the proper light config for normal aircraft and helos. Larger transports normally have a red rotating beacon on the belly of the plane and one on top and smaller aircraft usually have one only on the top of the vert stab. I thought that only one white strobe was not by itself unusual because strobes burn out all the time. But no red and green navs lights and no beacons struck me as strange. And here's the crazy part. I was so struck by the unusual lights that I went upstairs and turned on my handheld Uniden scanner and selected only the two frequency banks that have about 130 local aircraft frequencies programmed. I shut out ham and emergency freqs. because I wanted to hear what ( if anything ) was going on with this unusual aircraft.Heard in the next half hour two very strange exchanges between pilots and approach controller:1. Approach controller asking airline pilot to describe the lights on something. Caught only part of the this exchange.2. About 15 minutes later heard pilot asking approach controller if they had "it" on radar. Whatever "it" was. Controll answered that they thought they had it. Then scanner scanned through again and I did not catch any more of that exchange. As a pilot very knowledgeable of the aircraft lights, procedures and the type of things normally said over the radio, I thought the entire experience strange from start to finish. The fact that I went in to listen to the aircraft freqs after seeing it should tell you something. To an average person, this would only appear as a normal aircraft because most people are not knowledgable about the standard lighting on aircraft. "