I'm curious how you knew it was a Russian satellite?

This is a little off topic, but what the heck. Does a United Airlines 727 almost landing at a little bitty Army Airfield, with only a 5000 ft runway, by mistake one night count???

Standing on the dam of lake Buchanan in Texas looking to the south west and saw a large globe of light that looked like it exploded with a lot of light but no sound. I think it was ball lighting.

I'm going to hazard a guess or three:
- by the markings on the exterior, well lighted enough by the flames to read
- by the late-night reporting by Pravda
- by the counter-clockwise rotation after entering the atmosphere (indicative of eastern-bloc technology)
- by guessing

(Sorry Wildman...I couldn;t resist)

Depending on when that was Ray, could it have been the re-entering of the space shuttle? Several years ago, two different friends in Texas hill country said they saw the shuttle re-enter the atmosphere. I suppose maybe people could see it from most of the continent, but I only heard those two reports. They both said it was the most incredible "night sky" sighting they'd ever seen.

Or it could be that Wildman800 and his buddies had a similar experience to this man parking his car at the local supermarket

Oh yeah, it counts. An Identified Grounded Object!

Not really a ground object, at least not for long. He just made a touch and go when he realized that this little airfield, with only one person on duty (me), was about ten air miles from the large airport he was supposed to land at. Kinda made me think twice about flying United...

If I PM my phone number, could you let me know when you relatives visit?

-phil

It was identified as such in the newspaper a couple of days later.

It actually looked to me like 3 ICBM's on their way to the South Atlantic.

That was in the summer of 1980 and we don't even want to talk about what I was up to in the Keys then, but it was completely legal.