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Roger Ward and his wife Amy Maloney are still shaken up after encountering what they believe was a UFO last week.

The Indian Brook couple was taking their granddaughter to dance in Elmsdale on Thursday when Ward looked up in the sky to admire the beautiful sunset. What he saw among the red and orange clouds has him asking questions that still have no answers.

"It was probably about two kilometres away when I saw it," Ward said Tuesday in a phone interview. "It was pretty big. It was like the size of a football field or something. It was huge. It looked like a big anvil - a big grey anvil - in the sky.

They pulled over and his wife took out her iPhone to try for some pictures. In just those 30 seconds or so, the object in the sky had moved from somewhere between Milford and Elmsdale to probably over Grand Lake, heading south toward the ocean, he said.

"And then we saw the pictures that she took and it's shaped like a triangle and the sun is setting and (the light) hits it and it blocks out the sun. You can see it that it is something that is in the sky, something that we really saw."

Although in the photos the wedge-shaped object has taken on the brilliant orange of the sunset, Ward said it was grey when he first saw it and appeared to have a bulkhead with clear lines in the front. He estimated it was about two kilometres from him when he first spotted it, and about a kilometres from the ground in altitude.

"I'm freaked out right now telling you about it," Ward said. "We're beside ourselves.

"We had our granddaughter with us, too, and I don't know how much she seen of it but she was definitely excited in the back, so she might have seen it, too. But my wife and I definitely witnessed (it). We're still in a state of shock over all of this. And when I first seen it, it was awful close to the Halifax airport."

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Neither representatives with the Stanfield International Airport Authority nor NAV Canada, which runs the airport's control tower, had heard any reports of anything unusual happening that day.

Nor was any related incident reported on Transport Canada's Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System (CADORs), available online.

Ward figures it was something extraterrestrial.

"I don't know if, in fact, they knew that they were exposed and they sort of got caught with their pants down, I guess," the 57-year-old construction and general worker said.

He said he called the airport and was told to contact police if he thought there was a threat in any way but he decided not to do so.

Ward feels people ought to know about what he saw. He'd also like to know that others might have seen it, too.

"I bet you a hundred bucks, without even shaking your hand right now, that there's going to be other people coming forward, I'm really thinking, because I know that I probably wasn't the first one to look up at the sky at that time. Somebody else had to have been looking at the sky because it was a beautiful sunset. I'm just trying to get some clarity that way, just to say that my mind is not obscure or we're not crazy people. We saw what we seen and it was very disturbing and it's still disturbing to me now, as we speak."

The Chronicle Herald forwarded Ward and Maloney's photos to Dave Lane director of the Burke-Gaffney Observatory at Saint Mary's University.

He couldn't say what it is, but he was sure about what it is not.

Lane said the object is definitely not of "astronomical origin," since there are clouds clearly behind the shape as it is lit up by the sun in colours similar to the cloud striations.

"Anything that's, say, burning up in the atmosphere is typically way up, 50 to 100 kilometres up," Lane said. "By the time it gets down low, it's dark."

For Ward, like the popular science fiction TV series The X-Files, the truth is out there.

"It would be almost ludicrous of me to say that we're alone in this big field of planets that surround us," Ward said. "And maybe they're even living here on this Earth and we don't know that they're here. Maybe they're closer than we think. Maybe at some point maybe they will make initial contact with somebody or something to at least explain why they're visiting our planet. Hopefully."