Just when you think you've finally seen the P-Funk mothership, it turns out to be something entirely different. I was walking my dog Saturday night when I looked up to see what I assumed was Jupiter shining through a cloud. Then I realized there were no clouds anywhere, and Jupiter was over to the left of this light source. Very weird. It looked like a gigantic flashlight shining down through fog (hence I figured it was the P-Funk mothership, which is, I think, an understandable mistake). Then the light went away, but the foggy triangular cloud remained, glowing ever so slightly. It was quite a sight.
It took some digging online, but I was amazed at how fast the Intertoobz lit up with similar sightings from all over the East Coast. Someone finally posted the identity of the unidentified object: a NASA rocket launched from Virginia was creating an artifical noctilucent cloud at 172 miles altitude to help scientists study the upper reaches of the atmosphere. It's a more interesting experience to see something like this without knowing what it is, but all the same, it's worth checking out this video of the weird phenomenon (sorry, embedding is disabled, and I can't find any other videos of the event). Why doesn't NASA, say, publicize these things so people can check them out? Probably do wonders for their popularity and cut down dramatically on alien abduction stories.
Here's a pretty good still shot of what I saw–but it doesn't do justice to the weirdness that you'll see if you check out the video and watch the cloud take form:
