SIGHTING: GRASS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"At approximately 7:30 P.M, Saturday, May 28. I went to my back deck to have a cigarette. Just by pure chance I looked up and noticed a tiny dot high in the sky. At first I thought it was a planet, but after observing I realized it was slowly moving from left to right (east to south) in a slight upward angle. It was moving much too fast to be a planet and much to slow to be a satellite. Curious, I yelled to my roommate to get his camera. Once I was able to show him the anomaly he was able to get 5 pictures. The object stopped moving from left to right and began moving straight up until it crossed a very high altitude transparent cloud. Once it was in the area of the cloud it slowly faded from sight. The entire event lasted about 7 minutes.Note, I'm aware that the ISS was to do a flyover in my area, but that wasn't supposed to happen until 9:35 P.M., two hours after the observed event.It was an hour before sunset, so the sun was low to the West. To the naked eye the object appeared spherical and brighter on the side of the sun. Occasionally the object would dim. At no time did it look self-luminous, nor did it twinkle. I would say that it looked reflective, then less reflective, then reflective again, but with no apparent pattern. My roommate downloaded the photographs to his laptop, opened them in an image viewer and zoomed in up to 800%. Of the five photographs, we had images of very different objects even though they were all the same object. One image appeared as a fuzzy sphere, one a metallic sphere,one very fuzzy but with two points of reflection, one oblong and orange with what looks like a silver sphere at the bottom and, lastly, one that looked like a orange gold bell with a number of reflective spheres at it's base. No two images are alike yet all are of the same object only moments apart.My roommate saved the images to a USB stick and I opened all the images in Photoshop to see if I could get a better image, but could not. The object was so distant that past a certain point of zoom the just became too pix-elated. Under file info I made sure we had a time stamp and camera type used. I did not save in Photoshop. The photographs I'm attaching are the originals. In all five photos you will see, pretty much dead center, a very faint dot, when your experts zoom in between 300 and 800% they will see what's got me scratching my head.If you have any questions please feel free to call or email. The originals are still on the camera.All I ask in return for my description and photos is your professional opinion as to what the heck this thing is.One final note, Beale Air Force Base is about 30 miles West of where I live.Thank you for your time,Derek "