Carolina Live / News Channel 15
A tourist in Cherry Grove saw an unidentified flying object from his porch on Saturday night, and he's got video to prove it."Up to the northeast there was this light, a round light, probably I would say 20 percent the size of the moon," explained Mick Rudi, 69.
Rudi said he has been coming to the area on vacation since he was a baby and has never seen anything like it.
Rudi said he still can't explain what he saw.
"It didn't move, it just hung there and I watched it and I said what the heck is that? It gradually got smaller and smaller and disappeared over the horizon," he said.
Rudi grabbed his binoculars to get a closer look at the UFO and then decided he needed to record what he was seeing.
"You always see lights out there, there are boats and airplanes flying around, but this was nothing of that. The light itself did not illuminate the surface of the ocean which if it was some kind of a flare, it would have done that," he said.
We took Rudi's video to Jeremy Bass, an aviation expert and owner of Exclusive Helicopters, to see what he thought of it.
"That looked very much like a military jet training and the different color variations appear to be just different heat signatures, as the pilot was asking for different performance levels out of the engine," Bass said after looking at the Rudi's video.
But what about the moment Rudi said he saw the object disappear? Bass said he has an explanation for that too.
"It's not actually disappearing, it's just that that aircraft has now turned and is flying toward the viewer and they're so far away you don't see navigation lights," he said.
Bass added that he's seen that same thing many times before, not only from land but also when he's flown aircraft.
"I have seen the same shot that you just showed me. I can't begin to count the number of hundreds of times. The same look of that in so many different configurations. It's not even questionable. You're looking at a jet out there flying around that they're so far away, it appears that it's doing things that it's not," he said.
Another aviation expert echoed Bass' statements, saying that the object was definitely military.
But Rudi isn't convinced. He still thinks what he saw was out of this world.
"I was fascinated because you read stories about people seeing UFO's and various similar type things and I thought holy cow, I've never seen one and this is my opportunity," he said.
You can watch the video that Rudi shot by visiting the WPDE NewsChannell 15 YouTube page or by clicking here.