Any Theories About What I Saw?

Around Christmas 2001 (sorry, I never made a note of the date), I found myself with a bunch of friends atop Mt. Haleakula in Maui. From the top of the now-extinct volcano, we had an unbroken view horizon-to-horizon. The only clouds in the sky were clustered around the horizon. As we were about 10,000 feet up, the stars were very clear and quite bright.

Around 10 pm we noticed a very odd phenomenon. A white, totally straight line was bisecting the sky. It was quite faint, about magnitude two or three I would guess, and it was quite hard to focus on. To me it looked like it was made of sparks: one of my companions later described it as looking like a vibrating guitar string. It stretched right across the sky and was moving very slowly sideways.

After perhaps ten minutes it had covered perhaps as many degrees' arc in its transverse movement and faded out quite slowly. Maybe twenty minutes later it was back, again traversing roughly the same segment of sky, only to fade out, again after about ten minutes.

Like an absolute idiot, I made no effort to figure out which way it was stretching (north/south, whatever) and therefore in which direction it was moving transversely. All I can tell you is that it started out a little off vertical, maybe at the one o'clock position, and faded out maybe around two o'clock, probably not even.

I've been puzzling about this ever since. In discussing it with others, various options have been raised. It wasn't a meteor. I've seen plenty of shooting stars in my time, even a bolide. This thing HUNG AROUND and moved very slowly and evenly at 90 degrees to its length. It faded from view evenly along its length too. Nor was it a jet contrail: at all times it was utterly, utterly straight. I have yet to see a contrail that remains even along its length when it's being moved by wind. Or one that emits light.

The only thing I can think of is that it might have been some sort of star wars weapons test. Any ideas, anyone?

rich, did you ever see anything in the news about what you saw?
My guess is that it had something to do with the space station, or shuttle.
Do you remember if the shuttle was in orbit when you saw this anomaly?

Or hell it may have been a rip in the space/time continuum. My bet it was something mundane and explainable.

I will dig for you, but the same has been seen in antartica... oh in tim goods book alien bases, thats where i have heard of the same thing.... An antartic survey crew watched the same thing pass over head, followed by a light that split into two and went in two seperate directions...this was in the 1980's....

cause unknown, but no known scientific explanation is viable according to the book...

Nope, never saw anything in the news about what I saw. I'm pretty sure that whatever it was, it was artificial in nature. It was way too even both in its form and in the way it traversed the sky to be natural IMHO. And I'm up for it being mundane and explainable... but what have you got? Anything that mundane would be something we'd know about, surely?

And 'mundane', if you look at the roots of the word, means 'of the world'. I'm really not sure that this applies in this case - not that I'm suggesting it's necessarily ET tech, for example.

There are only two things that I can think of that go even the tiniest way to explaining what I saw, and I don't find either of them very satisfactory, but it's the best I can do. I'm thinking either, as I say, some sort of Star Wars test (because the line swept across the same sector of sky - roughly - each time) or maybe something similar but for HAARP. It really annoys me I didn't record date, compass bearing of the line (but no compass with me and no constellations I know well enough) and therefore direction in which line was traversing the sky.

As for the shuttle, I'm ashamed to admit I don't know. I'm actually really hazy on the date, even. I was working on a cruise ship at the time (we had an overnight in Maui) but I'm not even really sure which voyage I was on. I've also lost contact with the others up there that night so I can't ask them.

Very frustrating.

However, I'm just hoping that someone on this board might have seen something similar or one of the tech/black world guys who seem to pop up with gnomic pronouncements will make some sort of comment that I can think about.