SIGHTING: ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA (UNITED STATES)

Witness Testimony

"It was dusk and i had been outside for about an hour or so observing passing air traffic using my high-powered binoculars. as it was dusk, i started to look for stars/planets, first finding jupiter (to my west-southwest). in fact, jupiter was the only space object i had seen so far today. continuing to scan the skies, i turned about 360 degrees to see what i could see. i spotted with my naked eye what appeared to me to be a brighter-than-jupiter object, and so i took a look through my binoculars. focusing on the object as best i could, i reckoned it to be a planet, and was going inside to check my astronomy software to try and determine what it was i was observing. but before i could do that, i saw that the object "separated," for lack of a better word. the best way i can describe it was that it was a balloon of some type and a portion of it -- like a gondola -- dropped away from the balloon. this object i witnessed falling was leaving a trail of, presumably, smoke and whatnot. also, the falling object was lit up, so much so that it appeared to me to be of the same brightness that i had observed when i first spotted the object. at some point while the object was falling, my attention was drawn away to what appeared to be two aircraft flying almost within the field of view; that is, i could almost see both the airplanes and the falling object through my binoculars (they are a non-zoom type). the airplanes looked to me like b-52 stratofortresses...Perfectly lined up so that it looked like one plane with two sets of wings. these airplanes were headed east-northeast. returning my visual focus to the object i originally observed, well...I didn't see it. i looked through my binoculars and with my naked eyes: nothing. and now the airplanes were out of view. regarding the airplanes, my best guess on their altitude would be less than 10,000 feet. i say this because i think i recall hearing the airplanes (which is why my attention was diverted to them). and given the airplane-gazing i had been doing just before, i know what an airplane at, say, 30,000-40,000 feet looks like...And they are nowhere near that large. as far as the other object is concerned, i estimate its altitude to be in the same range. i say that partly because of how "quickly the one object was falling. my considered opinion is that the object would not have appeared to me to be moving so quickly had it been a a much-higher altitude. following my failed effort to visually reacquire the falling object and the "parent" object, i looked to see if i could spot the airplanes. i could not. they had become blocked by a building. thank you."