1985 Black Triangle

On this summer night, I was 15 years old and looking through my telescope towards the southeast sky when suddenly I saw a HUGE orange fireball with a long tail in the direct southern sky over the tree line behind our house.  I ran in the house and yelled for my family to run outside and see it.  About 15-20 seconds went by before we got outside, my dad was first to get outside and was looking directly upwards in the middle of the night sky.  As I was about to tell him to go further in the yard to look to the south, I looked up and witnessed a large black triangle-shaped object directly over our house moving in a north-east direction.  My aunt lived about 500 yards to our north and was hanging clothes and also saw the object.  The UFO was very silent with some sort of white gases and some kind of faded starred lights in the middle of it that seemed to move with the object.  I remember thinking to myself that how could such a large object make no noise.  It went dir! ectly over the local phosphate mine (2 miles away) where my uncle worked and we watched it for about 30 seconds until it was out of sight over the mine.  Due to the dark sky, it is difficult to judge the altitude of the object, but I believe it was about 2-3 miles high.  My dad said if it was 100 miles high, it would be the size of Florida.  The next day on local radio, my dad said that he heard many people calling and talking about an object they witnessed. I don't know if the fireball and the triangle object were related, but I believe they were.  Presently, my dad is still an auto mechanic, my mom and aunt retired from careers in education, and I will begin my 23rd year as a teacher in August.  That one minute in time changed my life as we were extremely fortunate to be witnesses to something that we still speak of to this day as we are still astonished.