SIGHTING: GASTONIA, NORTH CAROLINA (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"It was between 10:00 pm and 10:30 pm on oct. 20, 2016 and i was walking back to my house after taking my trash to the curb. i have a large yard with a long driveway so it takes a few minutes to walk out there and back. as i rolled the can to the street an airliner coming from charlotte douglas international airport flew over and i heard the sound of it fade by the time i parked my trash can at the pickup spot. we get a lot of air traffic overhead and it is pretty normal to hear the jets fly over at all hours of the day and night. there were no more airplanes that passed overhead after that one was gone. as i turned toward my house, i remembered that i had heard that there was going to be a meteor shower soon, so i looked up at the sky to see if i could see any. my house is located between two urban areas, so to the east and to the west, there is a constant urban glow in the night sky. when i looked up, i saw a dark triangle silhouetted against that urban glow. i thought, "am i really seeing this?" but i did not take my eyes off of it until it disappeared. when i saw it, the object was almost straight overhead, moving south to north. the northern part of the sky is much darker here, so when it reached that part of the sky, it disappeared from view. the whole incident took maybe five seconds, if that long. it moved very fast across half of the sky, from around 90 degrees overhead to where it disappeared about 20 degrees above the horizon -- much, much faster than the low-flying airliners that i am used to seeing. there was absolutely no sound at all to accompany the sighting. one other thing i noticed about it was that the trailing edge of the triangle seemed to have a very faint glow to it. i don't know if that was reflection of the lights on the ground or if it was emanating from the object. there were no other lights on the object. it was a solid, dark silhouette. the faint glow on the back was the last thing i saw before it disappeared against the blackness of the northern sky. last comment: i am dumbfounded as to, if it was one of ours, why it would fly without lights across a busy air lane. "