ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — "I’m always looking up. I’ve always been an aircraft enthusiast," Chance Hines said. He is a firefighter in St. Augustine.
One day around 7:15 in the morning of March 22, 2022, Hines was at the fire station in downtown St. Augustine.
"I just happened to look up one morning when I was checking the ladder truck, and I happened to see something odd in the sky," he said.
He took pictures of it with his cell phone.
"It was kind of like a ball but it was an unusual color," Hines described. He said it was white, but "almost like too bright. And it didn’t move. Even the amount of time I was out there, which was about 45 minutes, it stayed in one location."
"I know I’m not crazy, but maybe I need to get some of the others guys to verify this," he remembered.
So he told his co-workers and everyone at the fire station went outside, and, "We all saw it. We all saw it."
One of the photos he took has an airplane in it. "I kind of waited until it was close and took a picture."
Hines uses an app that can tell you what plane you see in the sky as well as its altitude. That day, that plane in the photo was "between 30,000 and 38,000 feet. So whatever the object was was higher then the plane. The object was higher than the plane. It was way up there."
Hines had to eventually go inside, "and later on that afternoon, I came back out to look, and it was gone."
Again, that was about a year ago, seen from downtown St. Augustine. Fast forward to this year, and the U.S. government says a Chinese spy balloon floated over the country. It was then shot down in the Atlantic Ocean.
"Well, it kind of resparked that interest," Hines told First Coast News. "You know, I was thinking, 'Hey! I took a picture of that. So maybe, just maybe what we saw was something of the same stuff that’s going on now.'"
First Coast News asked Vice Admiral Rick Snyder about Hines’ pictures. Snyder worked for years at high levels of the Pentagon and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
Snyder said, "Looking at those pictures, that could be the glint off of an airliner. It could be an actual weather balloon that we launched ourselves to get the weather on."
However Hines has seen a weather balloon before, and he said what he saw last March did not look a weather balloon. "No, it looked too large. It looked way too big to be a weather balloon."
Hines has traveled the country fighting wildfires and has worked with many different kinds of aircraft, but whatever that was in the sky a year ago in his hometown was "definitely unusual," he said.
First Coast News contacted the Northeast Florida Regional Airport in St. Augustine. A representative from the airport said nothing was recorded at the facility like what Hines saw on March 22, 2022.