Here is another article with a picture of it.
Photo Special to the Sun
Pauline Petsel, of Birds Bridge Road, photographed this fiery object in the night sky on Monday from her home on Birds Bridge Road. She and her husband, Carl, say they don't know what the object was.
Published: 11:27 AM, 07/09/2009
Source: The Greeneville Sun
Three Observers
Aren't Sure What
They Saw Monday
BY BILL JONES
STAFF WRITER
A Birds Bridge Road couple saw, and photographed, a fiery, fast-moving object in the sky over southern Greene County on Monday night.
Carl and Pauline Petsel say they don't know what the object was that they and a friend, who was visiting their home, saw about 10:30 p.m. Monday.
Carl Petsel, who is a retired St. Petersburg, Fla., police officer, said he first noticed the object in the night sky as he looked south toward Camp Creek Bald (sometimes called Viking Mountain) in an attempt to see fireworks.
He noted that the object was moving rapidly in a southerly direction toward the mountains that form the border with North Carolina.
Carl Petsel said he is convinced that the object was moving away from the area where fireworks were being shot into the air by a neighbor and appeared to be moving faster than space satellites he was seen in the past.
After he told his wife and their friend, Patti Ritter, what he had seen, Carl Petsel said, his wife, who is a skilled amateur photographer, rushed outside and took several photos of the fleeting object with a digital camera.
On Tuesday, Greeneville Sun photographer Jim Feltman attempted to enhance the digital images of the object Mrs. Petsel photographed.
After reviewing the enhanced photos, Carl Petsel said he thought the object might have been a meteor that was entering the atmosphere.
But Pauline Petsel said she was unconvinced that the object was a meteor.
"When I first saw it, it looked like it was on fire," she said, noting that the object appeared to her to have dropped vertically toward the earth before making a sudden "right turn" and speeding away toward the Asheville Highway (Tennessee Route 70 South).
Mrs. Petsel also said she believed the object had been moving along horizontally at a level below the top of the mountains that border southern Greene County.
However, Mr. Petsel said he believed the object could have been higher than the mountain tops.
In a written statement, the Petsel's friend, Patti Ritter, said the object initially appeared to be roughly about three-quarters of the size of the full moon.
She descibed the object as being orange in color and noted that it appeared to have "flames on it toward the bottom."
In her statement, Ritter wrote that the wind was blowing in a direction opposite to the object's direction of travel when she saw it.
"It took only a very short time to move and be out of sight," Ritter wrote.
She noted that she was surprised that the object did not appear larger in the digital photos that Mrs. Petsel took.