The man, who was enjoying a cuppa outside his Bendigo home last Tuesday evening, captured footage of the object on his video recorder and posted it on video-sharing website YouTube.

By yesterday afternoon the footage had been viewed more than 5000 times.

The man, who refers to himself on YouTube as wellsightedgentleman, noted that:”(I) just stepped outside this evening (Tuesday, April 14), enjoying a cuppa and this unidentifiable flying thing appears in the sky travelling steadily.

“I instantly ran inside and grabbed the HD video cam and captured what I could . . . I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

He said the peculiar object “tracked across the sky with a relative velocity moving in an arch from north to south . . . I really don’t know what this is.” Bendigo District Astronomical Society education officer Paul Foley said it was highly unlikely the object was an alien spacecraft.

“There are a lot of things in the sky which look pretty strange, that sometimes can’t be explained, but that’s not to say they’re alien,” he said.

“UFOs are not necessarily alien spacecrafts.” Mr Foley said the object could have been anything from a meteorite to a piece of a satellite that had burned up while re-entering the atmosphere.

“If there are aliens up their casing the earth with spacecrafts, they’re doing it in a really strange way. “If they really wanted to do something, they could land at half-time at the QEO on a Saturday,” he said.

Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Terry Ryan said Tuesday evening was a clear, dry night with north-westerly winds.

Police said they had received no reports of a UFO.

The video can be viewed at www.youtube.com/w atch?v=zYaSh8t4Sbg