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.