Help! What did I see last night?

Last night or technically sat morning at 12:15 am I was in my back yard letting my dogs out and I was looking at the sky as I always do. I havnt seen anything unusual for about a year but that was about to change. It was a clear sky as I looked to the west with no clouds in play. As I looked at a very bright star (Arcturus possibily) another bright star appeared out of nowhere for 2 seconds and then dissapeared and after 5 seconds it happened again and then a third time exactly the same way. I watched for another 10 minutes and it never appeared again. I cannot figure out what I saw and was wondering if anyone could help. What can do that?

Congratulations, you saw your first Iridium Flare.

Catching an Iridium Flare

Note: They look different to the naked eye than they do under exposure on film.

I never heard of them either till I posted a similar experience here on ATS at www.abovetopsecret.com...

Check out Heavens Above to correlate the scheduled time for these flares with what you observed.

reply to post by Zudrummer



Dont know.. sounds conventionally unexplainable, ive seen a number of anomalies recently as well, bought a telescope a few weeks back and must have seen at least 6 things that i couldnt explain, best one was a light that tracked across the sky for about a mile at fairly high speed, it blinked out 3 times then disapeered, will never forget it

reply to post by Zudrummer

This has happened to me as well near Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire .
We turned a corner and saw what appeared to be a very large star to our right .
It stayed stationary and out of nowhere a second and third appeared !!
It was'nt until they moved towards each other that we realised we were witnessing UFO activity.
They can hover for long periods of time and are completely silent.
And initially look like stars which is what you describe

reply to post by fraterormus


I thought there might be a natural explanation as it didnt move. Thank you very much. I had a sighting while out with my dogs last summer that was not natural.

reply to post by cassiopeia


Now that sounds a lot cooler than what I saw!

I suppose any metallic object catching the Sun is going to reflect light
according to how reflective it is.Something tumbling in high orbit,(and there are plenty of those now) will give the on/off effect if it has a greater reflective surface on a particular part of it than the rest,most of the things I have seen like that will eventually fade from your point of view.

reply to post by fraterormus


I'm not sure if what I saw was an Irridium flare because of 1 thing: didnt move just flashed on and off 3 times and looked like a star as in single point of light. Or am I wrong? Could an Irridum flare look like that. It sounds like they move with a tail?