Description

I was stuck in traffic on a bridge from Cape Coral to Ft. Myers, FL. It was either 2009 or 2010. I was on the phone with my wife and I glanced to the right, and on the Ft. Myers side, I notice a dark object just above the treeline. It's about 3/4 mile away and in the general direction of a small airport, so I figure it's a helicopter. We keep talking and I keep watching it. It's now about half way over the river and now I can see that it doesn't quite look right; no rotors, the shape isn't right.

I describe to my wife what I'm seeing. It is still moving in my direction, about 40 feet or so off the ground, but I'm confused. It is moving slowly and steadily in a straight line, but it looks like it is wobbling or something. Now, I'm not an aviation expert, but I can see at this point it has no obvious control surfaces. No wings, tail, rudder, rotor blades, etc. My first thought is Mylar balloon, but it's a little too big for that. I go through all natural options and I run out of possibilities.

My wife can hear the changes in my voice as it gets closer. It's now directly in front of my car, still about 40 or so feet high, and I can see it clearly in the middle of my windshield. What follows is the description of what I saw. It sounds fantastic, unreal and just too good to be true. I understand that, and honestly, I don't care what anyone else has to say about it. I am not claiming it was alien, I am only admitting that I could not identify it. That I could not understand why it was still in the air with no obvious source of lift.

It was a square, roughly 10 feet in diameter. It appeared to be metallic. It had five distinct panels visible on the side facing me. The lower right portion was in the shadow and was darker while the upper left portion of it was lighter and easily reflecting the bright sunlight. It had three "legs" equally spaced, coming out of the lower half like a typical tripod. Each leg had three segments, and each segment was rectangular, but with rounded corners. Each segment was "very roughly" 1' x 1' x 2'. Earlier, I mentioned that it looked like it was possibly wobbling. It was oscillating back and forth as it slowly and steadily drifted by me. Again I thought balloon. But the oscillation was exact! Each time it rocked back and forth, it moved the same distance (left side of the tripod legs went up maybe 2', then it rotated and the right side went up 2'). The body never moved up or down, left or right, it remained fixed in place as it drifted by at maybe 10 mph. In my mind, a balloon would not have been able to perfectly oscillate back and forth while not otherwise moving up or down or left or right. The wind would have been moving it as it blew it.

My wife kept saying my name because I had stopped talking while I tried to rationalize what I was seeing. I will be the very first person to ask myself when I see other posts, "You couldn't snap a picture, or why is your video so grainy and shaky?" The thought to hang up and take a picture never even crossed my mind. I was was nervous, confused, excited and awestruck. I just stared at it until it left my field of vision over some trees to the left.

From the time I first saw it until it was out of view was maybe five minutes. This whole time traffic was barely crawling. Other people had to see it! As we started moving, my wife was yelling at me to pull over on the bridge because I was shook up. The next day I posted a comment on a local site, not Craigslist, but I don't remember what. I asked if anyone else saw something weird the day before. I posted there first because I did not want to report a balloon to MUFON. A guy replied that he saw something strange in Ft. Myers the day before. He described what time, where he was and what it looked like. The time was right. When I looked on a map, his location was exactly where it would have been in Ft. Myers when I saw it over the trees near the river. We saw the same thing and neither one of us believe we saw a balloon. I reported it to MUFON with a sketch I made with an Adobe program. Never heard anything from them except that they received my submission.

Figured out how to add this here (https://preview.redd.it/833v7qtxu6u41.jpg?width=1152&format=pjpg&auto…)