The fool on the hill

By mooncoin

OMG

About 15 minutes after taking this photo I was standing outside the tent looking at the Milky Way. It was a beautiful dark starry sky.
Then, looking east, I saw two pale points of light larger than the stars moving towards me on a slightly diverging course. At first I thought meteor - but two at the same time seemed odd. Then one turned 45 deg to the SW and the other followed almost instantaneously. Then I thought maybe seagulls somehow lit from below. But there was a strong westerly breeze blowing and they'd have to be doing over a hundred mph to be making that sort of headway. After another second or so they then turned to the west and carried on closer together. It was then I shouted B to come out of the tent and be quick. She saw the now diminishing shapes flying off to the north west.
Ive had a pretty sleepless night trying to figure out what it was I saw. The whole episode lasted maybe 10 or 15 seconds. I've been trying to put some numbers on it. They were about 45 deg above the horizon when I first saw them and around 30degrees when I lost sight of them. If they were at say 5000feet that would give a distance of around 3 miles. A mile every 5 seconds is about 700 mph. But I would have heard something. They weren't on a ballistic trajectory because ballistic objects don't turn like that. If they were at 50000 that'd be 7000 mph. And the g forces in those turns would be astronomical. Really it's the weirdest thing I've ever seen and the only thing that has made me doubt my sanity. This morning I had to ask B if I'd really seen it because I was starting to think I'd dreamt it.

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