SIGHTING: HENDERSON, NEVADA (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"On 12/12/15, at 1:47 PM, I was driving my truck in Henderson, Nevada, on Anthem Pkwy, heading in a Southwestern direction when I noticed a small disk shaped cloud. The cloud peaked my interest since the Las Vegas sky was clear blue. The only clouds present were way to the North over the Sheep mountains. I noticed that contrails were active on the exhaust of commercial jets flying overhead because of the cold, clear dessert air. So the little cloud peaked my interest, as it was all by itself, and so I thought, what could cause this small little cloud? I slowed my vehicle, and took two pictures of the little cloud from my drivers seat using my new Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone, which has a 16M pixel camera with image stabilization. I could not make anything out other then the disk shaped cloud since the sun was shining in my direction. The pictures were dated by the camera as 20151212_134727 and 20151212_134752, which placed the time at exactly 1:47 PM. I stayed in the street and watched the little cloud dissipate like an ordinary cloud. It appeared to dissipate in about 20 seconds or so. The wind appeared to drift it towards the South. After the cloud dissipated, I thought nothing of it. After doing some chores, I was heading to get lunch. It was now about 2:10 PM. I drove west bound on E. Serene Ave. (between Pecos and Eastern) and then noticed the small cloud again forward and off to my left. The little cloud looked approximately in the same place as before and about the same size and shape. Now my interest was really peaked. I pulled over to the side of the road, and clicked off five more pictures using my smartphone. I could not see any detail, since the Sun was again shining in my direction. I did not review the images, and I proceeded home. Once at home, I looked at the pictures in more detail. What I saw was really surprising. Two of the pictures show a whitish sphere adjacent to the cloud. The last photo I snapped shows an arcing contrail like image that appears to start with the approximate location of the sphere, and ending in the cloud. Using approximate angles from my memory and two locations, (and assuming the object was indeed in the same place), I can triangulate the cloud to be approximately located over Sloan. This places the cloud about 7+ miles away from my first location. At the Serene location, five pictures were taken over a 31 second period. The first two photos, show only the small cloud and nothing else. The next photo is 6 seconds later, and shows a spherical object colored just the same as the cloud. The next picture two seconds later shows the object a little closer to the cloud. The last picture, 19 seconds later, shows a contrail like arc entering the cloud. So, in summary, first there is no object, 6 seconds later there is an object, and then 19 seconds later a contrail like arc going into the cloud. As the photos show, the cloud was changing shape a little during this 31 seconds, but this change is slow, which makes it hard to account for these spherical artifacts on the photos. If the arc photo was taken before the two orb photos, I would have assumed that the orb was just a spot of cloud. But in fact, as the time stamps show, its just the reverse, the orb appears first, then the arcing contrail appears last. It's hard to imagine a little ball of cloud shearing into a distinct contrail like pattern and arcing in such a distinct way. Also, clearly evident in the two photos is that the spherical ball moves closer to the cloud in two seconds.I haven't learned all the modes on my camera phone, as I now know I could have done a better job getting many more pictures, or even a video, but maybe next time!"