A WOODVALE stargazer has captured a series of extraordinary photographs of what he says could be an unidentified flying object hovering above Bendigo.Forty-eight-year-old Colin Davis told the Bendigo Advertiser he spotted the object last Saturday night (January 8) between midnight and 5am.Mr Davis, who is a retired camera operator, said he was standing at the back door of his home, facing west, when he noticed something strange in the sky.“At first, I thought it was a bright star and it appeared to follow the same path,” he said.“But I kept watching and once the sun started to come up it remained very bright and I realised I was looking at something very different.”Mr Davis said he had previously been sceptical of UFO sightings, but the extraordinary encounter had turned him into a believer.“Don’t ask me who was driving that thing, but there was definitely something unexplainable hovering overhead,” he said.Discovery, Science and Technology Centre Bendigo planetarium co-ordinator Craig Kendal said there could be a more simple explanation.“It’s possible the flying object was in fact Sirius, the brightest star in the sky,” Mr Kendal said.Mr Davis said a similar flying object was spotted by NASA satellite cameras conducting the space tether experiment in 2007.The experiment, which was a joint venture between the US and Italy, called for a large spherical satellite to be deployed from a US space shuttle at the end of a 20-kilometre-long conducting cable tether.

• See apparent YouTube footage of the NASA tether experiment

The idea was to let the shuttle drag the tether across the Earth’s magnetic field, producing one part of a dynamo circuit.But during the experiment, a UFO, of similar appearance to that sighted by Mr Davis, was filmed approaching the tether before flying out of screen.“I compared the images with footage from a YouTube clip titled ‘tether NASA’,” Mr Davis said.“And what was astounding was the similarity in the shapes, markings and hole formations on both the flying objects.”Bendigo Airport manager Bridget Conroy said that to her knowledge no aircraft, including helicopters, were in flight from midnight to 4am on Saturday.*Do you think it's a UFO? Post a website comment including your full name and let us know!

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