The Bright White Sphere Over Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana (14 September 2026)
A Louisiana witness filmed a bright white point crossing the evening sky and reported it as a sphere making abrupt, erratic changes of direction. The footage records something the report does not: the object dimmed by almost four magnitudes in eleven seconds and went out without ever leaving the frame. That is what a satellite does when it enters the shadow of the Earth, and the Chinese space station passed forty three degrees above Terrebonne Parish at the reported minute.
What did witnesses see at Houma?
A bright white point crossed the sky over Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, on the evening of 14 September 2026. The witness had just finished a jog and was walking down his own driveway when he saw it, filmed it on a Samsung Galaxy S22, and filed a structured report through ufosighting.report the following day. That report was relayed to r/UFOs on 20 September 2026 by the account u/ufosightingsbot, which confirms a filer from their own Reddit account through a one time link, so the submitter is verified as the Reddit user Independent_Kale2735.
The filing gives the time as 8:23 pm CDT on 14 September 2026, a single object, shape recorded as sphere, distance given as "as high as a plane", the observer facing south west, a duration of one minute and one witness. Under movement the form records "unpredictable, erratic, abrupt changes in direction". The witness wrote: "I had just finished a jog around 8:20 and was just arriving home walking down my driveway i noticed a a bright object flying across the sky going from west to east. The sky was very clear and nothing else was in the sky except for the stars, the moon and this thing." Asked why it could not be a common object, he wrote that he had checked flight radar and found no aircraft overhead, and had looked up the satellites without finding any large visible satellite passing over.
The clip runs 55.09 seconds at 720 by 1280 in portrait. It shows one unresolved white point against a dark sky, with a lit horizon visible at the very start of the recording. The point holds a steady brightness for most of the clip and then, in the final eleven seconds, dims steadily until it can no longer be separated from the sensor noise. It does not travel out of frame, it is not occluded, and it does not brighten again.
Measuring it puts numbers on that. Sampling the clip at two frames per second, subtracting a Gaussian blurred background and running aperture photometry on the brightest residual gives a flat mean flux of about 15,920 counts between 20 and 38 seconds. From 39 seconds it falls away without recovering: 9,402 at 41 seconds, 6,570 at 43, 4,860 at 45, 2,247 at 47, 1,488 at 48, 921 at 50 and 489 at 50.5 seconds, after which the tracker locks onto noise at random positions across the frame. That is a decline by a factor of 32.5, or 3.78 magnitudes, in 10.5 seconds, ending in extinction.
More footage and images of this sighting
What is the official explanation?
No agency has commented on this sighting and none is expected to. It was filed to a civilian reporting site rather than to a government office, and there is no AARO case number, no NUFORC entry and no local news coverage of it.
Two automated identifications were offered and both missed. The witness himself checked flight tracking and a satellite lookup and reported finding nothing that would be visible. The reporting archive's own automated sky context block, computed from a 15 September 2026 orbital catalogue, flagged something different again: "Starlink train overhead: 5 satellites from one launch (NE/NW/W, around 01:14 UTC)". That flag is doubtful on its own terms, because the Launch Library maintained by The Space Devs records no Starlink launch at all between 8 and 15 September 2026; the seven launches in that window are a Long March 4B, a Falcon 9 carrying USSF-153, an Electron, a Falcon 9 carrying O3b mPower 11 to 13, a Vega-C, a Zhuque-2E and a Gravity-1. Neither the witness's check nor the archive's automated one looked at the object that was actually there.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The Reddit thread did the work the automated checks did not. Two commenters engaged with the footage rather than the caption.
The user TodaysLunch challenged the filing's own movement field directly, quoting it back and writing that "this is straight up blatantly untrue", and asking whether it had been entered by mistake. The user R2robot went further and named a candidate, writing that the "Date/time/Location points to it being the Chinese Space Station" and that "it fades out of view as the Sun dips below the horizon", adding that none of the erratic motion described in the filing is shown by the object in the video, "only an unsteady camera". R2robot posted two screenshots from a satellite tracking application in support, and those screenshots carry their own date stamps.
This archive treats a debunk as a claim with its own evidence tier, so the claim was tested independently rather than repeated. It survives the test, and the screenshots turn out to be better evidence than they first appear, for a reason given in the assessment below.
The witness's own account, by contrast, contains one element that does not fit and should be stated plainly rather than quietly dropped. He describes the object as "flying across the sky going from west to east", and the computed ground track runs the other way, rising in the east south east and setting in the north north west. Recalled compass direction is the weakest field on any sighting form, and it is weakest of all for an object that passes high overhead, where left and right invert depending on which way the observer happens to be turned. This archive has logged the same problem before, on the Ocean City case, where the same witness gave opposite directions on two platforms a day apart. It is a real mismatch and it is weighed as one.
Is the Bright White Sphere Over Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana (14 September 2026) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one: how could this be mundane?
The candidate named in the thread is testable, so it was tested here from primary orbital data rather than accepted. The current general perturbations element set for CSS (TIANHE), catalogue number 48274, was taken from CelesTrak and propagated with SGP4 to the reported minute over a site at Houma in Terrebonne Parish. The station rises above five degrees in the east south east at 01:18:30 UTC on 15 September 2026, which is 8:18:30 pm CDT on 14 September, climbs to a peak elevation of 43.1 degrees at 01:22:30 UTC, and sets toward the north north west. Its computed altitude at closest approach is about 388 kilometres at a slant range of 550 kilometres, which matches the published orbit of the station.
The lighting works. A separate call to JPL Horizons for the Sun at the same site gives a solar elevation of about minus 16.7 degrees at 01:23 UTC, with the Sun in the west north west at azimuth 283.6 degrees. A depression of 16.7 degrees puts the zenith shadow cutoff at 281 kilometres, from the usual relation between the radius of the Earth and the angle of depression, so an object at 388 kilometres was still in sunlight while the ground below it was dark. This is the mirror of the Las Garcitas case, where a solar depression of 50.9 degrees put the cutoff far above any satellite and killed the official satellite explanation outright. Here the geometry hands the satellite answer back.
Then the two independent measurements meet. The same propagation puts the station crossing into the shadow of the Earth between 01:23:30 and 01:23:45 UTC, while it is still 26 to 30 degrees above the horizon in the north north west. The photometry taken from the video, which knows nothing about orbits, records the object beginning a monotonic decline at 39 seconds into the clip and reaching extinction at 50.5 seconds. For a recording that the witness timed at 8:23 pm and described as lasting one minute, and that is 55 seconds long, those two events are the same event. An object that dims by 3.78 magnitudes in ten and a half seconds and goes out while sitting high in a clear sky is not flying away, and it is not a lamp, an aircraft, a drone or a balloon. It is a reflector losing the Sun.
One further cross check matters, because the back propagation here is the weakest link in the chain: the CelesTrak element set carries an epoch of 20 September 2026 at 23:40 UTC and was run 5.9 days backwards, and a station reboost inside that window would shift the timing. The screenshots posted by R2robot close that gap. They are labelled "TLEs: 2026-09-14 00:00:00 - 2026-09-15 23:59:57", meaning they were computed from element sets belonging to the event window itself, and they give CSS at 210.07 nautical miles above mean sea level at 01:22:45 UTC and 209.99 nautical miles at 01:23:07 UTC, which is 389 kilometres, at a range of 305.73 nautical miles, which is 566 kilometres. Two computations from different element sets agree on the altitude to within a kilometre and on the geometry to within seconds. The back propagation is sound.
The filing's other distinctive claim does not survive either, although the reason is a limit rather than a refutation. The form records erratic movement with abrupt changes of direction. The footage cannot support that claim, and it cannot refute it either, because the registration needed to separate object motion from camera motion is unavailable on this material. A median stack of the background subtracted frames peaks at 1.22 grey levels against a per pixel temporal noise of 1.70, so there is no persistent point source anywhere in the field, no star to anchor a plate scale, and no angular rate obtainable. Phase correlation between frames returns peaks of only 0.016 to 0.064, and masking the object collapses them to 0.005 to 0.012, which is the documented signature of a correlation that was locking onto the object itself because the object is the only feature in an empty sky. So no motion claim is supportable in either direction from the file, and the honest statement is that the erratic motion is unevidenced rather than disproved. The case does not rest on it. It rests on the fade.
Pass two: if it were real, what is it?
There is very little room left for a pass two here, and saying otherwise would be dishonest. The event is a bright unresolved point, at a time and in a sky where a 43 degree pass of a 388 kilometre object was in progress, that extinguished itself within seconds of that object's computed entry into the shadow of the Earth. The one element that points the other way is the witness's stated direction of travel, and that single field would have to outweigh an ephemeris and a photometric curve that agree with each other to the second.
The tier is set at Strongly Disputed rather than Discredited, and the distinction is deliberate. There is no hoax here and no dishonesty. A man came home from a run, saw something genuinely bright in a clear sky, filmed it, checked two databases that both failed him, and filed a careful report through a structured form. The form's movement field is wrong and its object is identified, but the footage is real and the account is honest. That is a misidentification, which is the commonest outcome in this archive and carries no discredit to the person who reported it. The same reasoning was applied to the Campo Largo and Spring Hill cases.
Worth recording for its own sake: the identification came from a Reddit commenter working from a tracking application, while a purpose built automated sky context service attached to the report pointed at a Starlink train from a launch that does not appear to exist, and the witness's own satellite lookup returned nothing. The most heavily instrumented parts of this pipeline were the parts that got it wrong.
Sources
- www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1wllacr/bright_white_sphere_with_erratic_movements_over/
- ufosighting.report/sighting/13016/bright-white-sphere-with-erratic-movements-over-terrebonne-p
- celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/gp.php?CATNR=48274&FORMAT=TLE
- celestrak.org/satcat/table-satcat.php?CATNR=48274
- ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/
- ll.thespacedevs.com/2.2.0/launch/?limit=1&mode=list
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