Pilot photographs mysterious orange orb in daytime sky over North Carolina mountains
As a 45-year pilot, Charles Cobb had never seen anything like the orange-tinged orb high in the North Carolina mountains sky on a sunny late morning in June.
The object was round and irregular, he said, and it would suddenly plummet tens of thousands of feet before soaring right back up, he said.
Cobb, an 88-year-old Korean War combat veteran, spotted the mysterious object while sitting at
Silver Creek Airport in Morganton.
Minutes ticked by as the object and its exhaust plume hovered 30,000 feet to 40,000 feet high “toward Table Rock,” Cobb said.
He was referring to the
plateaued peak northeast of Asheville.
Cobb said he finally pulled out his iPad and took photos of the flying object and its “opaque” center. It was 11:18 a.m. June 12.
“It was hard to tell the size,” he said, although he distinctly recalled the craft dropping at times to maybe 15,000 feet before shooting back up to at least 30,000 feet.
The object vanished at one point when he happened to look down at his iPad, but it soon reappeared, he said.
“The fact that it could zoom up almost out of sight” made this no ordinary object, he’s convinced.
The craft also was “flying parallel” during the 15 to 20 minutes he watched it, he said, so it couldn’t have been a comet.
This object “always pointed north.”
Definitely not a comet, Bernard Arghiere, board advisor with the Astronomy Club of Asheville, agreed
“There is no reported astronomical object, certainly not a comet, in the sky that would appear that bright on that June 12, 2020, date,” Arghiere said in an email.
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article246648773.html
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