The object was “heading southwest from the northeast part of town,” Johnson said, and at first he thought it was a helicopter, although his opinion quickly changed as he continued to watch the object.
“As it got closer, I thought it was a balloon or trash blowing around,” he said in a statement on YouTube. “As I got right up on it, I could clearly see it was a cube spinning or wobbling on an axis.”
As he watched, the object appeared to stop moving and hover over Springfield’s downtown, at which point Johnson was able to park his work vehicle in the turn lane and retrieve his phone to film it.
By the time he was able to start recording, he needed to use the phone’s 12x zoom to capture the object.
Johnson described the object as a “cube spinning or wobbling on an axis” that “looked like it had auras coming off the bottom and middle.”
“I know it is reflecting sun[light], but it also seemed as though there was lights going around it at about center mass and lower,” he said.
Due to being “tired from a long day” and the fact this encounter took place during rush hour traffic, Johnson said he didn’t linger very long, but after he stopped recording, he was “able to watch if for about a minute longer,” before it “flew northwest towards the Willard, Missouri area” and disappeared.
Assuming he wasn’t the only one who had seen the object, Johnson called his parents since they live in the area.
“They said they didn’t see anything, but that they heard a loud noise at the time I was seeing this,” said Johnson.
So far, the leading skeptical explanation for Johnson’s sighting is that he witnessed a cubic mylar balloon caught in a draft.