> Growing up I was known among my neighborhood friends as the local
> "whiz kid", as I'm sure many of us were :) Whenever they thought they
> saw a UFO (about once a year), they would ask me to evaluate it. Most
> of the time I could quickly ID it as an aircraft or satellite. Once,
> though, they came up with something I've never been able to explain.

> They showed me a slow-moving object which reflected sunlight to
> varying degrees as it moved across the sky. It was evening but still
> very bright out, during the summer. With binoculars, I could see that
> it was oblong, but couldn't see any wings. I couldn't see very much
> detail, as if it were at a very high altitude, much higher than a
> normal airliner (or a much smaller object at a lesser altitude). As it
> moved, the side of it would sometimes catch the sun and deliver a very
> bright reflection, and other times not. It moved much slower than I'd
> expect either an aircraft or satellite to move, but did keep a
> constant speed. There was no contrail.

> My best guess is that it was a very large orbiting object, like
> perhaps the Mir space station (this was around 1993 or 1994, so prior
> to the International Space Station).

Could be a booster stage.  I know that many are in orbit and are
tracked since ground controllers would prefer it if their shiny new
satellites avoided colliding with such space debris. :-)  Orbiting
boosters are tumbling randomly so their brightness fluctuates oddly.

						Lee Jones

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