As a 45-year pilot, Charles Cobb had never seen anything like the orange-tinged orb high in the North Carolina mountains sky on a sunny late morning in June.
The object was round and irregular, he said, and it would suddenly plummet tens of thousands of feet before soaring right back up, he said.
Cobb, an 88-year-old Korean War combat veteran, spotted the mysterious object while sitting at Silver Creek Airport in Morganton, where he visits each day to check on the 1940 Piper Cub he keeps in a hangar.
Minutes ticked by as the object and its exhaust plume hovered 30,000 feet to 40,000 feet high “toward Table Rock,” Cobb said.
He was referring to the plateaued peak northeast of Asheville that’s a popular tourist destination for its panoramic views of the surrounding Linville Gorge, as described by AshevilleTrails.com.
Cobb said he finally pulled out his iPad and took photos of the flying object and its “opaque” center. It was 11:18 a.m. June 12.
“It was hard to tell the size,” he said, although he distinctly recalled the craft dropping at times to maybe 15,000 feet before shooting back up to at least 30,000 feet.
The craft also was “flying parallel” during the 15 to 20 minutes he watched it, he said, so it couldn’t have been a comet.
“Comets come toward you,” he said. This object “always pointed north.”
Morganton - The place of the sighting
Was it a plane?
Definitely not a comet, Bernard Arghiere, board advisor with the Astronomy Club of Asheville, agreed after The Charlotte Observer emailed the club two of Cobb’s photos.
“There is no reported astronomical object, certainly not a comet, in the sky that would appear that bright on that June 12, 2020, date,” Arghiere said in an email. “There were no comets then that would be that bright, so they would be visible in the daytime sky.
“It really looks to me more like sunlight reflected off a distant jet and its related condensation trail; typically, that would disappear from sight in less than 20 minutes.”
“Good luck getting a definitive answer on this one,” he added.
Carolinas a UFO hotbed
The Carolinas are a well-documented hotbed of UFO sightings.
One recent study had Charlotte beaming itself up into the ranking of the top 10 largest North American cities for total UFO sightings in the past century, the Observer previously reported.
Other cities in the Carolinas made related lists for sightings per capita, including Wilmington, Asheville and Myrtle Beach.
The Queen City’s 153 sightings of mysterious lights, discs and orbs in the sky since 1910 had Charlotte ranked ninth among the 25 largest cities by population and tops in North Carolina.
San Francisco-based True People Search, compiled the rankings based on sightings people sent to the National UFO Reporting Center in Davenport, Wash.
No one reported a sighting similar to Cobb’s that day to the non-profit center, which maintains a public database of “objective UFO data,” according to its website. It offers an online form and telephone hotline to report sightings.
At 9 p.m., about 10 hours after Cobb’s sighting, a Huntersville resident reported a sighting of “bright light flares” turning 90 degrees in the sky.
At 5:25 the following morning, a Salisbury resident saw a “spear or teardrop structure streaming across the sky with a vapor trail and cast off glare from the rising sun,“ according to the National UFO Reporting Center database.
‘Round’ and ‘irregular’ object
Cobb said the shape of the object is why he’s certain it was no plane.
He said he’s shown the photos to many pilot friends, who all are as stumped by the object as he is, including a recent American Airlines retiree who flew F4 Phantoms in the Air Force.
“None of my flying friends have any idea as to what it was,” he said.
Cobb lives in Morganton and served on a Navy destroyer during the Korean War.
He said he thought the object was “a huge kite with a tail” at first.
He put it out of mind until Wednesday, he said, when he happened upon an airline pilot’s account on YouTube of a mysterious object that came within 100 feet below him on a flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Charlotte in 2003.
Nearly 100 passengers were aboard when the pilot maneuvered to avoid the unknown object. The airline was not named in the History Channel video that’s drawn 339,500 views.
”Your brain says this can’t be happening, but you have to deal with the here-and-now, in the present,” the pilot says in the video. “One hundred feet is a thumbnail away from where you’re at, and that distance can be closed in literally a fraction of a second.”
Cobb lives in Morganton and served on a Navy destroyer during the Korean War.
He said he thought the object was “a huge kite with a tail” at first.
He put it out of mind until Wednesday, he said, when he happened upon an airline pilot’s account on YouTube of a mysterious object that came within 100 feet below him on a flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Charlotte in 2003.
Nearly 100 passengers were aboard when the pilot maneuvered to avoid the unknown object. The airline was not named in the History Channel video that’s drawn 339,500 views.
”Your brain says this can’t be happening, but you have to deal with the here-and-now, in the present,” the pilot says in the video. “One hundred feet is a thumbnail away from where you’re at, and that distance can be closed in literally a fraction of a second.”Cobb contacted the Observer, he said, in hopes someone else might have seen it, too.
Joe Marusak
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