round yon mothership, tender and mild...

I saw my first ufo last night.

Pat and I were in Somerville, MA, leaving a party around 10:45pm. I looked up and there was a pale red object flying across the sky.

"What the hell is that?"

Pat and our friend (whose party it was) looked up, and I pointed out the weird thing.

It wasn't a perfect circle. In fact, it looked like an orb that someone had sat on. It was moving at about blimp speed.

We ruled out natural occurrences pretty quickly. It was way too big to be a planet or a star (it was easily five times the size of the closest star when I first spotted it). It also wasn't a comet or a meteorite (too dim, too slow, and no tail). It wasn't a cloud (sky was clear). And it wasn't the moon (which was behind us).

We also started ruling out man-made objects. It definitely wasn't a plane. It didn't have flashing lights, nor was it moving as fast as the others planes in the sky (we were near Logan, so there were plenty to compare). It wasn't as bright as the planes' lights. It wasn't a party balloon -- it would have been way too high to appear that large.

It didn't change direction. It didn't change speed. It just traveled smoothly across the sky from west to east.

So we watched it for about three or four minutes, until it got too small to see.

And we got in our car and came home.

It's possible that it was a weather balloon. It seemed like it could be traveling at the same speed as the winds higher off the ground (there wasn't a breeze on the ground). That would probably also explain its weird squishy shape.

As for the red glow, I don't think it had an internal light source; it wasn't bright enough and there wasn't a brighter spot on it. It's possible that it was reflecting light from the ground. (We did start getting some cloud cover on the drive home, and the clouds were pink -- though not as red as this thing was. Of course, we had no way to determine how high up it was.)

Perhaps it was just Santa doing a test run with the sleigh.