That's probably right. An optical illusion. One night in the late 1950s I
was flying back from Las Vegas to Laredo in a T-33. We were around 30,000'.
I was in the front seat and saw a saucer shaped red/orange object way out at
11 o'clock coming straight at me. (around this time there had been numerous
flying saucer reports in Texas). I pointed it out to the pilot in the back
seat and we both became alarmed. It maintained shape and increased in size,
indicating it was moving right towards us.

Just before I might have taken evasive action the "saucer" lost its disk
shape and we could see it was the moon rising between cloud layers. Since
we were looking through lots of atmosphere horizontally, it had a red/orange
color. When it first rose above the lower cloud level it was a small disk.
As it continued to rise we saw more of the moon, still in the disk shape
which produce the illusion it was moving straight towards us. Once more
than half the moon was above the cloud layer we could see it wasn't a disk
at all but the top of a round moon rising.

--

Darrell R. Schmidt
B-58 Hustler History: http://members.cox.net/dschmidt1/
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"DM" wrote in message
...
DM wrote:

snipped

thank you to everyone who replied. I've been considering all the
explanations offered and appreciate the information. I'm pretty close to
accepting the "optical illusion" idea but am not quite there yet. I was
looking hard at that plane because I really didn't want to believe what I
was seeing. If it weren't for the fact that I could read the name of the
carrier on the plane, I'd probably be going for a UFO explanation!

Fly safe everybody.

Debbie