SIGHTING: STE. GENEVIEVE, MISSOURI (UNITED STATES)
Witness Testimony
"On the evening of thursday, august 17th, i had just put my 2 children to bed (a kindergartner & a 4-month-old). i then finished cleaning up from dinner & after sitting to rest for a few minutes, i walked outside with my husband to share a cigarette. we strolled over to the side of my house to lay on my hammock, which i have suspended between 2 ash trees. the air was temperate, approximately mid-70's, pleasant but a bit on the humid side with a few high clouds. we watched the sky as the sun set, and then my husband walked inside to retire as i lay on the hammock, looking up into the sky over my house. i often do this after the kids are asleep, as i enjoy looking at the stars & constellations, and i also get treated to the occasional meteor or falling 'space junk' when i gaze up at the slice of dark sky that is above me when i relax on my hammock. i am lucky to live in a rural area, so the light pollution is greatly lessened, despite the few annoying dusk-to-dawn lights that are scattered around our small lake development. we live in northwestern ste. genevieve county in missouri, about 50 miles south of st. louis. i watched the stars getting brighter as night fell, when i thought i noticed one of the 'stars' move. i shrugged it off & continued to gaze at the sky, when i saw the 'star' move again! it was darting quickly in a rather erratic way, up & down, then in one direction in a kind of jerky, stop/start way, then loops, then back. no real pattern to the movement best i could tell. i fixed my gaze on this object or light & tried to focus. it seemed to have an vertically elongated spherical shape, with what appeared to be a yellow/red/blue/green 'band' of lights around the center of the object. it was distant, but after watching it for around 10-15 minutes and making 100% sure i wasn't imagining this, i hobbled back over to the house (i am awaiting a hip replacement) to call my husband back out. we walked over to the side of the house & i spotted the bright object again standing right beside my hammock, looking just over the roof of my house & just above the middle of the horizon in the western sky. my husband spotted it right away, except he wasn't looking in the same direction; he was looking at the southwestern horizon & spotted another object that looked & behaved very similarly. i pointed his head in the direction of the object i had spotted & he instantly saw the anomaly. i don't think it could have been a drone based on apparent distance & erratic behavior plus the unusual shape. it was definitely not a helicopter, plane, or other typical flying craft. i see high-altitude jets, we occasionally hear the test pilots flying military craft at high speeds in the vicinity, and the local air evac life rescue have flight paths near me. i can easily recognize those day or night by sight and/or sound. this craft was silent as far as we could tell, and it's fairly quiet out here in the country, but we never heard a sound. since the object was kind of 'star-like', it was hard to see any lights at first, but after approximately 20 minutes of both of us watching the object(s) dart & dip around erratically, i noticed the one in the western horizon suddenly seemed closer & less star-like, more 'craft-like'. it seemed to start zooming in then back out as it darted around but it zoomed in & out sort of slowly as it darted back & forth and all around. i turned to my husband & asked him "hey, if i can see it, can it see me?" he paused & said "probably not", but i could hear he wasn't totally sure about that. suddenly i felt very uneasy about the whole experience, and advised we gather up & head in. we did so in an unusually rushed way. my husband went in first and i got mildly upset with him for going in a few feet ahead of me, citing that 'something potentially scary' was out there with me. this is unusual because i spend a lot of time outdoors & unusual phenomena or anomalies don't normally affect me in such a way. i just observe & appreciate if i see something u usual, because i know i'm lucky to see anything that could be classed as such; the universe is a beautiful & strange place and i believe anything is possible. i'm as far from being a skeptic as i am from being a believer in ufo & other phenomena, but i know that we both saw something we had never seen before last night. we have been talking about it all day, so we decided we should submit this report today while it was still fresh. it seems relevant to mention that i felt uneasy the rest of the evening & night, double-checking all the door and window locks, restless, and looking in on the kids more often. this is very unusual for me as i grew up in this house & i'm totally comfortable here, but last night i was so shaken by what i saw that i found it hard to sleep until daylight. this morning when we took my daughter to school, we both looked up at the exact same spot on the horizon as if to check & make sure the craft was gone, then caught each other looking & laughed. definitely a very unusual sighting for me, as i'm 45 years old & have never seen anything like this before, something i would definitely call a totally unidentified flying object. "
