"Black, reflective, larger than several football fields" - Texan Sees UFO, or Soviet Satellite?, in 1986

• When: Summer of 1986
• Where: Austin
• What: "Huge black object, reflecting the city lights and with fire shooting out various places, moving very slowly"

A sighting of an extremely large, black object slowly moving over Austin has just been reported to MUFON (case 124784). The sighting occurred all the way back in 1986, so apparently the witness was not able to forget about it:

Black, reflective, larger than several football fields....

My son came upstairs to our apartment and said come see this. We went downstairs and observed a huge black object, reflecting the city lights and with fire shooting out various places moving very slowly from south to north past the intersection of 183 and 35. We and many other people were watching this calmly pass over us. I believe it was summer of 1986. But can’t quite be exact. Afterwards the Austin Statesman said it was a Russian space debris burning up. What nonsense! It glided slowly with no noise at all. We were dumbfounded. I’ve never been able to find any reports of this. Unfortunately we didn’t think to take pictures. It was bigger than several football fields and I can’t remember seeing any defined edges. My husband who is deceased and my son who doesn’t like me giving personal information also saw this. I can attest to what I saw.

The witness claims that the Austin Statesman referred to the event as "Russian space debris burning up," which they were suspicious about.

I couldn't find this exact wording in old newspapers, but I did find a series of articles from August 1986, which described a "Soviet satellite," called Cosmos 1767, crashing back to Earth, specifically into the Indian Ocean:

According to reports, the details about this satellite were largely unknown, and so it's unclear what it looked like.

According to NASA, Cosmos 1767 Cosmos "was a Soviet ELINT (Electronic and Signals Intelligence) satellite launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome aboard a Zenit 2 rocket," which was "based on the first generation Tselina ELINT," which you can see pictures of below.

What is odd is there is also an article detailing the satellite crash from February 1986; the problem with that is Cosmos 1767 allegedly didn't launch until July 30th, 1986. So, it seems like there is more to the story...

At the time, the Austin American Statesman reached out to Jim Oberg, a former NASA engineer, and acclaimed space journalist and author, for comment; Oberg said the Cosmos 1767 appeared to be the "fifth in a series of unusual launches."

Just a few years after all of this, in 1988, another Soviet satellite, this time called Cosmos 1900, and this time radioactive, would also be predicted to fall back to the earth, though it's unclear if it ever did.

Is it possible this UFO witness in Texas in the summer of 1986 saw a secretive Soviet satellite? Or was this just a convenient cover story for something far stranger?

Let me know, as always, what you think of this story in the comments.

Did you also live in Austin in the 80s? Did you witness the Cosmos 1767 satellite crash, or something else strange in the sky, during the summer of 1986? Report your sighting, and help us solve this mystery!