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Oct 17, 2023

Dartmouth Family Captures Early

A South Dartmouth man is wondering just what it was he saw flying in the sky

A South Dartmouth man is wondering just what it was he saw flying in the sky near his Howland Street home Monday morning, and he's hoping someone else saw the same unidentified object as well.

"I really wish I knew what it was, but it's very interesting," Joe Sylvia said. "Very interesting."

Sylvia said his wife leaves for work each morning at 4:30 a.m., and he usually goes outside with a cup of coffee to have a cigarette while waiting for her to leave. While he was standing out there Monday morning, something strange in the sky caught his eye.

"I was standing on the porch and I saw this light. It was so long, so bright, and it was really high," he said. "At first I was like wow, a shooting star, but it had no trail behind it. It wasn't moving, or it was moving at such a slow pace it was hard to tell if it was moving at all."

Sylvia didn't have his phone on him, so he ducked back into the house and told his wife to come check out what was happening outside. He went down to wake up their son so that he could see it as well, and while he was doing that, his wife captured two photographs.

He said by the time he got back outside with his son, the object "buzzed right off," moving north to south.

"It started moving, but it wasn't moving at sonic speed or anything like that," Sylvia said. "It was a hell of a lot faster than an airplane would move, though. I see jets every day, I used to fly airplanes myself, and this definitely moved faster than a plane would ever do."

Sylvia said the object made no sound throughout the entire sighting.

"No sound, and no plane lights up front to back," he said. "There would be landing lights, marking lights if it was a plane and you would hear a rumble as it passed over, but this was silent and made no sound whatsoever."

He said it was "so high that the stars were nowhere as bright" and also estimated that it was "about 50 times the size of a jet."

"This thing was big. If it had been flying lower, it would have been huge," Sylvia said. "I wish I had my phone so I could have taken video, but at least my wife thought to take a few photos while I was getting my son."

He posted the photos to a Facebook group in the hopes that someone saw the same object in the sky.

SpaceX did launch a Starlink satellite from Cape Canaveral in Florida late Sunday night, but the satellite was already in orbit just a bit past midnight on Monday.

It's no surprise that an unidentified object would be seen in the skies over South Dartmouth, especially considering the long history of UFO and other paranormal activity at Round Hill. There have been numerous UFO sightings across the SouthCoast in the past few years as well.

Sylvia said he’d never seen a UFO before and even though he is perplexed about what exactly it is that he saw Monday morning, he is still glad to have had the experience and to have been able to share it with his family.

"It's definitely something to see, and I’ll probably never see something like that again in my life," he said. "It's like it was meant for us to see it."