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Remarks |
My wife (who saw it too) and I were traveling with our two children on I-90, returning home to Brookings, SD from Christmas at my folk's in Rapid City, SD. I was driving and she was in the passenger seat. Our kids were in the back. We were roughly between mile marker 353 and 354, which is between Mitchell, SD and Sioux Falls, SD, traveling in the eastbound lane, facing a dark sky to the east. There were limited clouds if any and it was ~5:40 PM and so no stars were appearing quite yet (although many stars would form in the minutes after the sighting).
Out of an all-dark sky, the object appeared out of nowhere almost directly in-line with the interstate, but slightly to the left of center (if the interstate is center). It appeared as if it was the first star of the evening; however, it didn't "fade-in" like a star, but turned on like a light switch, which I thought was odd. The reason I would describe it as star-like is because it was pale yellow in color (not unlike many stars) and as intense as an average star when it was first spotted anyway. Additionally, it appeared stationary in the sky (now I can interpret this as being due to it traveling towards us, but at the time I thought I was looking at a star. We were in a moving vehicle too, so movement of the object may have not even been detectable by us).
About two seconds after formation of the apparent “star”, it became evident to use that it was not actually a star, as we noticed what we interpreted to be an orange sparks or flames (appearing as orange dots and/or dashes moving away from the body to the right and slightly upward, as if the object was perhaps traveling leftward [north] and slightly downward also). But, again, the star-like object appeared relatively stationary. To better describe the orange sputters: they looked like the sparking tail of a launched firework or like maybe the trail of a flare fired from a flare gun, except several miles away.
After another 1-2 seconds, the body of the object quickly gained in intensity (probably 10-fold?), appearing like one big landing light of an aircraft pointing right at us (still pale yellow). The orange sputtering on the right stopped momentarily. At this point, I honestly thought that maybe it was a jet that was probably traveling north, but had engine trouble (i.e., the orange sputters) and was circling back to the Sioux Falls airport to land and it was merely just facing us (westward) for a short while (explaining the up-shift in intensity) until it could fully turn to head south back to the airport.
But, to my amazement, with the intense bright pale yellow glow still present the orange sputters appeared once more in succession in the same exact right-ward and slight upward orientation as seen a second or two earlier. This didn't make sense to me, as I felt the "aircraft" was oriented directly at us…. so if it was the backside of an aircraft engine causing the orange sputters, they shouldn't be that pronounced |
