On the 24th August, 2008, at 14:37 (+2 h GMT) local time, I was looking up from my computer monitor through a large southerly window in my study when I became aware of an airborne object that did not conform to any known conventional aerodynamic shape. Location, Randburg, a Northern suburb of Johannesburg in South Africa.

The craft became visible and appeared from a westerly direction through the bare branches of trees (Spring foliage being still some weeks away), at the right perimeter of the window and proceeded in an easterly direction. It then moved through a large unobstructed viewing segment of the window until it disappeared in the East, gradually obscured by other trees at the left-hand perimeter of the window.

It is important to note that the window consists of high quality glass with no noticeable optical distortion, that the glass was perfectly clean and clear, and that the luminosity contrast between external ambient light and internal light conditions was not conducive to any internal reflection.

The craft was visibly well-defined, had a perfectly oval shape with a dimensional ratio of around 3:1 - its longer horizontal, major axis about three times its height. The meteorological conditions were: clear sky, no cloud with infinite visibility (30 km+), bright sun, temperature at 22 C and humidity at 40%. Colour of the craft was in various tints of white, ranging from a brilliant white on its upper surface, transitioning very smoothly down through its largest equatorial diameter to a less luminous, creamy white on its lower surfaces.

Judging from its specific reflective albedo and this in combination with slight optical speckling caused by atmospheric refractive effects, the latter compared to atmospheric conditions as judged from their reference effects on surrounding terrain, I judged its minimum distance to have been eight km. The craft had no externally protruding structures detectable and no contrasting internal lights or other detectable surface features.

The craft spanned an apparent angular size of one degree (see diagram) and covered an angular distance of fifty degrees from West to East in about 8 seconds. With some trigonometry this implies that at the apparent distance its major (horizontal axis) size was about 159m (about 2 ¼ times as long as a Boeing 747) and was traveling at around 968m/s, i.e. 3484 km/h or about Mach 2,86. No sonic boom or other acoustic effects which would be expected at such velocity and distance were detectable which would appear to indicate the craft's translational and inertial reference medium being uncoupled from the terrestrial - this leading to conjecture about its propulsion system being certainly unconventional and perhaps in the class of anti gravitational technology.

The craft's translational progress was utterly smooth, showed no variation in velocity, had no deviation from a smooth trajectory, and if anything its path could be suspected of following a very slight descending curvature as result of gradual change in altitude which ranged from an initially judged 10-12 degrees of arc above the horizon to a final 8-10 degrees ATH.

As an interesting exercise, from the apparent dimensions of the object compared to a Boeing 747, I estimate that roughly around 84 of the 747’s fuselages would fit in the object’s body volumetrically. Taking the maximum takeoff weight of a 747 as 330 metric tons and speculating a possibly similar mass-to-volume ratio for the object, would project its mass to be in the region of 28000 tons – about that of a medium-sized passenger ship.

Although such a mass-comparison may not be justified due to very different materials and construction, it does put some perspective on how a body this size is maintained in what appears to us as an “aerodynamic” path. It then becomes rather clear that anthropocentrically allocated factors such as technically conventional aerodynamic lift and drag have little or nothing to do with its progress through the terrestrial atmospheric medium.

Although this unidentifiable aerial object was not spectacular perhaps, as I have certainly seen more spectacular and impressive UFOs, (see UFO Casebook Newsletter #53) this is the third sighting of such phenomena I have witnessed in about fifteen years.

Sincerely,

Frank Valentyn

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