New Years Eve, 2016

From our east facing back yard, in a cloudless section of the sky, rising up from the eastern horizon, I observed an orange light in the distance, the size of a bright star. It appeared to be approaching. It was fading up and down in luminosity.

Time: around 10.50 pm, 31 Dec 2016, New Years Eve.
Location: North Reservoir, Victoria.
Weather: Semi cloudy, fine, no rain or wind.
Object direction of travel: NWW
Witnesses: Two
Sound: None

I assumed it was a chopper at first. Then realised all characteristics including its velocity were different to a chopper as it was getting closer.

At this point I called out my wife and quickly grabbed my expensive astronomical binoculars which were close by. It was maintaining a consistent rapid vector towards us.

When it was still distant, through the binoculars I could see a fuzzy roundish fuselage, which seemed blurred. I couldn't make out a fuselage.

The orange light within it was becoming less clear on approach. Next, as it continued on its path, it went behind some clouds. We could soon see red illumination on our side of the clouds, the underside you could say.

Just before it broke out through the cloud layer, it got very puzzling.

The reason being, is that I'm accustomed to seeing commercial airliners break though the clouds when coming towards us, I’ve seen these come through hundreds of times, and they always present with particular dimensional width and light colouring.

We live close to an Eastern Tullamarine air channel.

What I was seeing up there was way too wide, and all orange/red, from left to right. No white or blue lighting at all.

What was most striking was the width of this reddish line of illumination in the clouds. It was double or triple the width a jumbo jet presents with. At least double.

Then it broke out from the clouds and slid over towards us under the clouds.

The clouds it popped out of were not close or low. That’s why it was perplexing just before it emerged. It looked like it was at light plane hight at minimum, but can't be sure.

It was pretty high.

It's deep featureless black made it hard to determine its altitude and size, though it retained roughly the same altitude from when it broke through the clouds to when it passed above us.

It was at the very very least, larger than a light plane, but most likely, given its dimensions in the clouds, twice as wide as a commercial airliner or more.

The nature of the light on it was clearer just after it popped out the clouds. It was a long and very thin well defined technological straight strip of orange/red light extending horizontally from edge to edge of the object, on the objects rim that was closest to us. The orange/red colour was unusual, and much the same colour as an odd flying object I observed in 2012. A strange, captivating and ultimately indescribable deep orange/red.

The light gradually disappeared as it approached. The light may have receded out of view because it crossed the threshold of a lower rim perhaps. Can't be sure. The light faded out when it ended up at an elevation of about 70 degrees from our viewing point, almost above us.

The object did not completely stop, it slowed down though.

It's shape become clearer as it approached.

When the light was gone, a definite black silhouette of an oval-like shape could be made out.

The thing looked extremely beautiful and sleek. Highly technological looking with that light strip, and no other features what-so-ever visible apart from its indian ink black surface.

The black surface was non-reflective, so it looked a bit like a hole in the sky.

It was completely silent at all times.

It effectively silhouetted the well lit city clouds now above it when looked at via eyes.

Next is something odd: on this first approach, to the naked eye, it didn't look like it was rotating or gestating. But when it was at its closest point, while looking through 10x binoculars, the shape didn't seem stable. Some kind of oscillating expansion and compression was happening.

The nature of this oscillation is as follows: imagine an Australian football shape. Then imagine this oval football shape is very malleable.

Imagine putting one’s hands on the two pointy ends of the shape, and squeezing. As we squeeze the ends in towards each other, it eventually passes though being a round shape all the way until it's a football shape again.

But our hands, not having moved from their original positions on the surface, are now on the long sides of the football shape rather than on the ends.

We have squashed it into a new football shape, its long axis is now oriented 90 degrees to what the long axis was before.

In reality one could probably perform this shape distortion with a bendy plastic hoop or a balloon.

The object, when observed through the binoculars, was doing this squash rapidly and then un-squashing back to its original shape, squash and back, squash and back; in a continuous rhythmic fashion. About one squash and back cycle every 0.7 or 0.8 of a second.

It was perplexing. It didn't look like it a rotation as one might at least expect, but a squash in and out motion instead. And a huge apparently solid air vehicle doing it! Doesn't make sense. It also looked more of a grey shade through the binoculars, lighter than the city lit clouds above it. It had extremely sharply defined edges when seen through the binoculars.

Then when I switched back to naked eye viewing, it became the original black object again.

There was another difference between naked eye and binocular viewing.

When I disengaged from the binoculars and changed to naked eye viewing, this oscillation wasn't visible. It looked as stable as it did when it originally approached. I went back and forth from binoculars to eyes twice.

Maybe it was always oscillating and we weren't able to perceive it via eye for some reason?

The duration from first noticing it on the horizon to when it was positioned above us was no longer than 40 seconds. We got a very good look at it.

After around 10 to 20 seconds in its slowed down phase, it accelerated off, not deviating much from its original NWW heading. The whole massive structure started rotating anti-clockwise as it slid off. Imagine seeing an ice hockey puck moving from the perspective of under the ice. The objects sliding motion was similar.

We ran though the house to get a better view of it leaving, but it was gone.

I don’t know what it was, but do know what it wasn’t.

Saw a bat a few minutes later and had a chuckle. The object and bat shared some characteristics. The object was black and silent like a bat. Very mysterious.

This was new years eve. There were fireworks going off now and then.