A Florida family was left stunned after spotting a strange white orb hovering silently in the sky for nearly half an hour during a backyard barbecue in Lakeland – but Redditors believe they found what it is.
The sighting occurred around 3.30pm on April 20, 2025, according to a Reddit post by user u/JoeBeeff, who captured the mysterious object on video and shared his observations online.
While enjoying the sunny day with his brother, they noticed something odd: a circular object hanging motionless in the sky.
In the footage, the man can be heard saying, ‘How long have we been looking at this thing, like 25 minutes in the exact same spot?’ He later adds, ‘It’s not moving,’ clearly baffled.
u/JoeBeeff elaborated in his post: ‘The object is still in the sky as of writing this, it doesn’t move from what we can tell, not even a little.
‘My brother got out his binoculars and it looks circular in shape, almost like you can see through it, and had defined edges visible from the sun’s light.
‘It was difficult to keep the binoculars steady enough to clearly make out what it is, but I feel like even if I could I couldn’t identify what it was.’
He added that a high-altitude jet flew near the object at one point, making the orb seem unusually large or strangely positioned.
A Florida family was left stunned after spotting a strange white orb hovering silently in the sky for over half an hour during a backyard barbecue in Lakeland this past Sunday
‘It appears to me like the object is at a lower orbit than the jet was, that or it is a massive object,’ he said, emphasizing that the orb didn’t drift with the wind.
‘With the naked eye you can clearly tell it’s circular shape, but it doesn’t move.’
The sighting quickly garnered attention on Reddit, where users began analyzing the phenomenon.
User u/attsci identified the object on FlightRadar as HBAL728, a Raven Aerostar high-altitude balloon.
Another user, u/Abrodolf_Lincler_, corroborated this by referencing data from SondeHub, indicating a weather balloon above Lakeland at that time.
Despite the initial mystery, the consensus among the Reddit community points to the object being a high-altitude balloon, likely used for scientific or meteorological purposes.
Such balloons can appear stationary due to their altitude and the observer’s perspective from the ground.
This strange sighting comes as another so-called ‘orb’ sparked an online frenzy – this time in space.
During these events, the moon appears as a dark circle moving across the bright surface being monitored by the observatory – a sight that has sometimes been mistaken for a UFO near the sun
On Monday, NASA released footage from its Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) showing a dark, circular object drifting across the face of the sun.
The video went viral, with conspiracy theorists insisting the orb was a UFO, claiming it ‘stopped, hovered for a bit, moved closer to the sun,’ then vanished.
‘I guess we’ll just have to settle for no answers – and watch this get swept under the rug, just like the obvious UAPs we see every day,’ one X user lamented.
Some even went so far as to suggest the celestial object triggered the widespread power outages recently reported in Spain, France, and Portugal.
In reality, NASA confirmed the sighting was nothing more than a lunar transit – a routine celestial event in which the moon passes between a spacecraft and the sun, visible only from space.
On Sunday, the moon covered 23 percent of the sun in a partial eclipse, visible only to NASA’s SDO.
Another clip from NOAA showed the moon as a glowing orb zipping through space, adding to the confusion.
The video captured the moon as a dark spot in the frame, moving in front of the fiery sun
But NASA scientists emphasized that the apparent ‘hovering UFO’ was simply the moon blocking the sun’s light.
The SDO even captured detailed views of the moon’s mountains as it moved across the sun’s surface.
The latest transit lasted about 30 minutes and is part of a series – more are expected on May 25 and July 25.
During the final transit, the moon is expected to cover 62 percent of the sun’s face.
Meanwhile, the next solar eclipse visible from Earth won’t arrive until September 21, 2025, and will only be seen from parts of New Zealand, the South Pacific, and Antarctica.
NASA’s SDO has been monitoring the sun since its launch on February 11, 2010, capturing continuous high-resolution images to better understand solar activity – and occasionally sparking a UFO rumor or two along the way.
