2001 Leonids Meteor Storm & UFO sightings
2002 UFO sighting
Ok, so it's not much.
Photographed with a Polaroid PDC-700 (el-cheapo) digital, which has no shutter speed adjustments and has no ability to do time exposures.
If this meteor wasn't so slow & long-lasting, all you'd see here is a yellow, light-polluted sky with nothing in it.
The camera was facing north/northwest. By that you can immediately tell this isn't a Leonid, but was one of three "rogue" meteors that appeared along with the Leonids
on the morning of 11-18-01.
The color was as you see it - a whitish green. With only one exception, all of the Leonids I saw from this vantage point were white or off-white.
The meteor itself was much brighter than this, but by the time my brain sent the "press shutter button" message to my finger, it had already burnt out.
So what you see here is the luminous train it left behind, perhaps 500ms after the meteor itself was gone.
This is the same meteor train, with the image digitally enhanced by using the "Auto Levels" button in Photoshop.
The brightest Leonid I saw appeared to be about magnitude -10. The projectile itself was an eye-piercing whitish violet with a darker violet coma, and it had a long tail colored green
& white with purple and red edges. There was no persistent train; at least none I could see for more than a second or two with all of the sodium vapor streetlamps outside my
window polluting my view. This was the very first meteor I saw, and it flew by at approximately 00:50 hours PST.
All of the other Leonids I saw were white or off-white (ranging to a yellowish-white); and many of them left visible white colored trains that lasted up to 1 second.
Except for the very first one I saw, the brightest were probably around magnitude -5 to -6.
From 00:45 until 06:30 PST on 11-18-01, I saw approximately 200 Leonids, 3 rouge meteors, 3 unexplained flying objects, an extremely bright, blue-white (HID-like color,
magnitude -4 to -5) satellite (maybe the ISS?) , and a yellow glowing, rather ordinary looking satellite from my NNW-facing, restricted sky view vantage point.
The ISS(?) flew from northwest to southeast; it was the brightest orbital body I've ever seen. Through 10x50 binoculars, it had approximately twice the apparent diameter of Jupiter as seen through the same binoculars, but
I was unable to make out any features or projections on it. The color was a brilliant blue-white, like those new HID automobile headlamps; and it was slow-moving and very easy to track
with the binoculars.
The yellow satellite flew from west to east. I also tracked & viewed it with the binoculars, but it still looked like a star-like pinpoint of yellow light. So it couldn't have been very large.
Both appeared sometime after 05:00 hours. For information on the three unexplained objects including a rendering
of one very bizarre flying crescent, please
see my UFO page. (NOTE: This page is no longer available for lack of server space. I have transferred my 11-18-01 sightings here for your convenience.)
Date: November 18 2001
Time: 2:22am
Location: Home (1st and Pine, Seattle WA, directly above the Pike Place Market)
Conditions: Clear, temp approx. 2°C.
Camera & Film: None
UFO sound? Low rumbling with jet-like overtones.
UFO lights? None.
Duration: 20 seconds
While watching the Leonid meteor storm from my northwest-facing window, my eye caught a slow-moving object flying in a northeast to southwest direction.
At first I thought it might have been birds - until I focused more closely on it, ignoring the bright meteors streaking by in the opposite direction.
It appeared to be a large, crescent-shaped object, flying with the curve of the crescent facing forwards and the tips behind. As it flew a bit closer, I started to hear
a very low rumbling sound with an odd, fainter "jet engine" noise overlaid upon it.
The object itself appeared to be a medium to dark grey in color, and was illuminated solely by the sodium vapor streetlights from the downtown Seattle streets below.
It had a pebbly kind of texture, as if it were made up of hundreds of small circles or spheres, like BBs from a BB gun.
The rendering I made in Photoshop as you see here isn't that far off from what the object looked like, but I couldn't find a filter that would *exactly* simulate the
texture.
Once the object was almost overhead, it seemed to turn slowly out to the west, and disappeared over the water as it flew farther away from its source of illumination.
The noise it made also faded away as it flew off.
There were no light emitters of any kind visible, and no exhaust flames or glow visible. The engine noise was a very low rumbling, such as what one might hear in an earthquake;
accompanied by a much fainter "jet turbine" sound, like a standard passenger jet sitting on the tarmac with the engines set to idle. Or like a very nasty vacuum cleaner motor; though
much, much fainter.
Date: November 18 2001
Time: 2:30am
Location: Home (1st and Pine, Seattle WA, directly above the Pike Place Market)
Conditions: Clear, temp approx. 2°C.
Camera & Film: None
UFO sound? None
UFO lights? None.
Duration: 90 seconds
About ten minutes after seeing the flying crescent, I saw two more unusual objects, and interacted with one of them.
The first one was a small yellow-amber circle or disk, about the size of a small dress shirt button held at arm's length. It flew slowly in an east to west direction. Since it had no apparent lights of its own
and seemed to be illuminated only by the sodium vapor streetlights of the city below, I ruled out a regular aircraft, and shot at it with a 11.6 milliwatt green laser. I just wanted to see
if it was a plastic bag or a balloon caught up in the breeze.
Although I could see the beam of the laser in the night sky, I did not see any of the green light reflect off the
object back to me, and it continued to fly west until I could no longer see it.
About a minute later, another, smaller amber colored circle showed up. This one was about half the size of the first, and flew with the same speed, direction, and flight path as the first.
It also had no apparent lights of its own. So I shot at it too, and this time I saw my green laser beam reflected back at me. After hitting it several times, it suddenly slowed way down and
made an abrupt turn towards the north, and started moving off again. I quickly got rid of the laser by kicking it under the bed, and kept watching the object.
About ten seconds after it made its northward turn, it came to a full stop and just hung there like a star. I watched it closely for any movement, and there was none.
About 15-20 seconds after it stopped, it simply winked out, as if someone kicked a lamp plug out of the wall.
Both objects had a smooth, steady flight motion without any signs of wobbling, rocking, oscillating, or rotating; and neither one had any visible moving external parts like rotors or wings.
These objects and the flying crescent were reported to the National UFO Reporting Network after the meteor storm started to die off around 5:00am.
No other objects (besides meteors, the ISS, and a satellite) were seen during the 90+ minutes I watched the skies *after* these sightings.
Date: August 09 2002
Time: 2:22am
Location: Home (1st and Pine, Seattle WA, directly above the Pike Place Market)
Conditions: Clear, temp approx. 17°C.
Camera & Film: None
UFO sound? None
UFO lights? None.
Duration: 90-120 seconds
After a night of shooting a documentary for one of my other websites, I was having trouble falling asleep. So after lying in bed for an hour and a half, I decided to poke my head out the bedroom window to look for any stray Perseid meteors. About two minutes after I started scanning space, a large, very slow moving object caught my eye after having emerged from the limb of a building rooftop across the street from me. The object was shaped like a slightly elongated diamond with significantly rounded corners. It was predominately dark grey in color, and it had four lighter colored, large spherical lobes or projections on its underside. It had no lights of its own; and was illuminated solely by scattered light coming from sodium vapor streetlights in downtown Seattle. No sounds were coming from it either.
It appeared to be travelling from the north/northeast flying towards the southwest; arcing more westerly as it flew out over Elliot Bay and eventually became invisible as it flew farther and farther away from its source of illumination. It exhibited a slight but regular oscillation, appearing to make swings of perhaps 10 degrees off axis; but it did not spin or rotate. That is, its leading edge always remained its leading edge. It flew with its major axis in its plane of travel and its minor axis was perpendicular to its flight plane.
About 20 seconds after I first spotted it, I went to the other room and fished a pair of 10X50 binoculars out of the couch cusions, then scrambled back to the bedroom window and pulled myself up into it. By that time, the object had dimmed significantly and flown farther away, so I did not oberve any additional details with the binoculars than I originally saw with the unaided eye.
The object had the apparent size of a thumbnail held at arm's length. Altitude is impossible to gauge accurately, but because it was illuminated from ground scatter and quite visible in this dim reflected light, it couldn't have been more than 1,500 feet high or so. The photograph above was constructed using a real photo of the building it flew over; the object itself was Photoshopped in afterward. I did not have a camera handy when it appeared; it was very likely too dim to photograph anyway.
Since 11-20-01; 
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