weird UFO over Providence Rhode Island

Recreation using Photoshop. The hovering gray potato chip first seen in the sky above the highway. This was drawn slightly larger that it appeared. 

 NOTE: click on any image for a closer view 

At about 6:30 p.m. on Thursday April 25, Andrea and I saw something very odd in the sky. We were driving towards Providence Rhode Island for a small weekend UFO conference. We were headed to Suzanne Chancellor’s house for the night before the event.

While on the highway approaching Providence, we both saw an odd thing in the sky. My first thought was that it was a partially inflated balloon, or a thin sheet of plastic that was floating in an updraft. What I first saw seemed lumpy and irregular, like a giant potato chip. It was gray in the partially overcast sky. My first thought was that it was just a small dark cloud, but it stood out differently than a cloud would (see image above).

Andrea saw it too and we both wondered what it might be. I remember saying, "That's too dark to be some weird little cloud."

We were heading southeast on Highway 146, and the road twists and turns through sections of trees and buildings. We would lose sight of it, and it would reappear when our car came around a corner for a view. After a while it seemed to change shape, it now looked like a slightly curved “credit card” and we were seeing it from a side angle so it seemed very thin.

The object and dot recreated from one of Andrea's photos. This was drawn slightly larger that it appeared in the sky, it was perhaps half that size.

I sensed it was slowly rotating, so when it reached its thinnest orientation, it seemed to disappear—then it would rotate just a bit more and would pop back into view. We were in traffic and there wasn't much we could do. Andrea was frantically trying to get a picture with her phone, but she didn't capture anything. (see image above).

One very strange detail was that this floating gray thing was positioned directly under a single dot in the sky. I kid you not, it looked like a credit card hanging from a pin by an invisible fishing line!

Another detail, and this feels tricky to describe. The color was a neutral gray, just a bit darker than the cloudy sky. Yet this this color was eerily flat, without any change. It wasn't like some object simply painted gray, it was all one tone, without any shadow or reflection or shading. In some sense, it seemed like a two-dimensional projection in the sky, the same way movie credits are flat and neutral over the background.

Eventually we turned a corner, lost sight of it, and it never reappeared.

A sequence to show the slow rotation and how it seemed to vanish. The thin object would continue to rotate and pop back into view. The single dot is shown above the object.

For a few points along the highway we had a long clear view. The buildings of downtown Providence were in the distance, and there were big jet planes low in the sky. We were crossing the flight path of a nearby airport. We thought it might be a balloon, but it was too stationary in the sky. It’s hard to know how big it might have been, to me it seemed much larger than a billboard hanging sideways. Whatever it might have been, it was dangerously close to the air traffic.

The rotation was an eerie slow-motion, and didn’t seem to match how something big might be effected by the wind.

We arrived at Suzanne’s house and told her and Jack about what we had seen. Andrea talked excitedly about how you could stare at it and it would pop in and out of view. I think this disappearance and reappearance was from the weird rotation and it was thin enough that it appeared to momentarily vanish (see image above).

This happened to two experiencers in a car, on the way to the home of two experiencers, and all of them would spend the next few days at a UFO conference.

Also of note, Providence is a noun in the dictionary, it means: The protective care of God or of nature as a spiritual power, God or nature as providing protective or spiritual care, and timely preparation for future eventualities.

This image is sized more accurately. The previous images showed the details a bit larger in the sky than they appeared.  Click on the image for a closer view.

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