Regarding the meteor crash in Russia...

[ThoughtCriminal]

160. Saw my first "UFO" earlier this month

I've been watching satellites since I was a very small child. My dad was a NASA scientist, and would often point them out to me. In the 1980s I subscribed to mailings from Goddard Spaceflight Center for satellite orbital elements and manually enter them into a computer program so I could watch for them. Later these became available at places like Compuserve and AOL which was a big time saver. Today, satellite observers can use sites like Heavens Above to plan satellite observations:

http://www.heavens-above.com/

I'm a pretty experienced observer. I've seen things that I recognize as natural or man-made that might bring a flood of "UFO" calls from people who do not spend much time looking up.

This time of year, I'm up and at work before dawn, but I usually don't take the time to look for satellites in the morning. In any case, it was only a half hour before sunrise and the sky was already bright enough so that only the Moon was visible overhead. But from the west, I saw a bright point of light. It was about as bright as Venus (which would have been the eastern sky) and moving. I watched for several minutes as it moved from west to southeast, passing close to the moon and eventually fading out in the predawn sky. I was quite certain that it was probably the International Space Station, which I had seen many, many times before. Few satellites are even close to being that bright.

So, as soon as it was gone, I went inside and checked on the Heavens Above sight. Nope, the ISS was over a different part of the Earth. I printed out a complete list of every satellite that could have been visible from my location that morning. There was an old Soviet rocket booster that was passing over on that path at that time, but the predicted brightness was dimmer than magnitude 4, so it should not have been visible in a sky that already to bright for any stars to be seen. It turned out that the same rocket booster would pass over that evening - about half an hour after sunset - so I could observe the brightness of the same object in similar conditions. It was not bright enough to see. It is possible that it was the rocket booster, but it just happened to be have a very reflective surface point at me in the morning. But generally, rocket boosters do tumble and if one surface is very reflective it will fade in and out as it rotates. This was constantly bright as it moved across the sky. And as I mentions, the ISS is the only thing I know of up there that comes close to being that bright.

Possible explanations:

1. A very large, bright satellite not cataloged at Heavens Above
2. It was the ISS, but Heavens Above was showing the wrong position (I have not had that happen before - ever)
3. It was the Soviet rocket, but an unusually bright surface was reflecting sunllight at me for several minutes.
4. It was not the satellite, but instead a very high altitude aircraft (too far see lights). There was no contrail or blinking lights.

That's my UFO story. Not a fly saucer, dramatic dash-cam video, or anything exciting, just a bright point of light moving across the sky that, despite my experience, I can't identify.