Take note, the Federal Aviation Administration had no reports of plane crashes. Huntersville police also dispatched an officer to look for the mysterious object: No immediate reports of little green men with ray guns.

At first Angell feared it might be an airplane crashing, but a former military pilot himself, he said the colors weren't right. The orb was a bluish-white and he said it moved too slowly to be a comet.

"It was a very shallow descent and a glowing flare as it went down. It was visible for about, oh, 10-15 seconds," he explained. "Heaven only knows what it could be, but some type of a UFO. I'm not saying an alien but something."

Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, all who saw it said it disappeared into the horizon without answers to what the strange sight was.

Interestingly the National Weather Service fielded more than a dozen calls, and of course there was no report of a downed plane, so the strange object remains a mystery.

Charles Miller sent in this photo along with details of a mysterious light he witnessed flying over North Carolina....

Last night (Wednesday, Jan 24) just after 8:30, I was in the backyard smoking a cig and saw a light coming in toward Kings Mountain from the south-southeast. It was pretty much on the same flight path as some of the air traffic that comes out of Charlotte Douglas, and I didn't think much of it at first, but as it got closer I could plainly see that the thing didn't have any flashing lights, just a blue-green glare.

I went into the house and got my camera and came back out in the front yard to shoot it as it passed over my house. Even though I know I had the thing centered in the frame, it came out off-center, but that's the problem with telephoto. Even so, you can tell that it isn't a plane or helicopter, it was too slow to be a meteor, and was too quiet. I got one shot on the thing and my camera battery suddenly exhausted. The thing continued northward at a steady pace until it passed behind trees and I lost it.

Today (Thursday, Jan 25), I was surprised to learn that there had been sightings of blue-green lights in the sky all the way from Charlotte, NC to Greenville/Spartanburg, SC -- and even a report from Kentucky -- and variously described as a meteor, space debris, or a slow-moving ball of light that changed directions, depending on who was telling the story. The Charlotte Observer newspaper featured the story on their website and requested any reports and photos from their readers, so I submitted my photo and brief report this afternoon.

The Observer immediately contacted me by phone and asked a few questions about the sighting, and in a matter of minutes they posted a RETOUCHED version of my photo on their website. Obviously, The Observer cropped the photo down and brightened it by many magnitudes, so the thing on their website looks like a brightly illuminated disk when, in fact, the thing I saw was more of a hazy glare and was not that bright.