emphryio

Anyone else see it? It appeared at least 3 or 4 times larger than Mars and very bright in afternoon sunlight. It took 60 miles of driving for it to move from about 45 degrees off of directly overhead to directly overhead. Many, many cars were stopping on the highway to look at it.

30 minutes or so after the sun went down it went from starlike very bright to dim. (Sort of like the Hale Bopp Comet looked at night, fuzzy.)

I'm guessing it was 50 to 100 miles high unless it was moving right along with the car. But that would have meant that it was huge. Yet it seemed to definitely be reflecting sunlight, suddenly greatly decreasing in brightness at least 30 minutes after sunset possibly longer.

Any idea what it was?

A new ion drive spaceship was launced today......

wade-w

I didn't see it. What part of New Mexico was this?

Arken

I've searched all the news sights I can including NM newspapers, looked at space.com, newscientist.com and even artbell.com (just for fun) and I see no mention of it anywhere. Kind of odd if, as you say, 'many, many cars were stopping on the highway to look at it.'

Just to clarify, I'm not accusing you of making it up, I just think it's weird that no one reported anything this morning.

Undercurrent

I didn't see that, but I did see a little light at about 21:30-22:00, NNE from downtown Santa Fe. I would have assumed it was an airplane, but three times a light seemed to fall from the main light (obviously, the mothership was dropping off some landing craft .)

It wasn't enough to make me gawk incessantly, but it caught my attention.

Shadowy Man

How fast were you driving?

Was it moving in the same sense as the sun and the stars? What do you mean by 3 or 4 times larger than Mars? Mars is basically a point source to the naked eye.

In which direction did you have to look to see it? It was brighter during the day than at night?

It's hard to say what you saw. They do launch rockets and missiles from White Sands Missile Range in Southern New Mexico very frequently, but they would have moved very quickly.

Mageth

It may have been a NASA balloon.

See here.

Here's how big some of these suckers are:



Aah...go here. Click on "Fort Sumner Operations" or one of the other links.

You may have seen BLAST Flight # 522N, whatever that is.

Late_Cretaceous

It could have been an "Iridium Flare" (communication sattelites that have large reflective solar panels which catch the light). They can appear very bright for a few seconds as the solar panel turns to the viewer. At the Heavens above website you can plot in your location and the time, and see if there was a flare visible to you. Heavens above also lists other visible sattelites.

Shadowy Man

Most likely not. The "flare" only lasts a couple of seconds. He said it took driving 60 miles before it moved a quarter of the way across the sky. A typical low Earth orbit satellite takes only a couple of minutes to cross the entire sky.

Undercurrent

We have a winner!

From the Santa Fe Nude Mexican:

Officials: UFO a Research Balloon

Corona688

NASA should start painting 're-max' on their balloons or something, just to stop freaking people out. And man, those things are HUGE!