Benette Sherman still isn't sure what she saw yesterday morning.

Sherman was up earlier than most, well before dawn. "It was actually 4:40 a.m. when I saw this thing," said Sherman, who lives in Concord, near downtown. "I looked out the east window and it was a bright light just shining in the sky. I thought at first it was a light on one of the steeples, but there are no steeples where I was looking."

The light was so unusual - Sherman noticed the light blinking before it took off in the sky - that Sherman wondered whether she'd seen a UFO. It was, Sherman said, "way too bright to be a star." And after watching the light for about 30 seconds, "it started blinking - not star twinkling, but blinking."

There was "maybe 30 seconds of blinking, and I was trying to listen to see if it was a plane. . . . I really couldn't hear any background noise."

Then, Sherman said, the object began moving away rapidly. "It looked like it was going way faster than a passenger plane," she said. "I just thought, 'That was peculiar.' "

Sherman recalled that the object "wasn't humongous." Rather, Sherman said, it looked like a spotlight in the sky. It appeared to be above downtown Concord, or near the river.

Perhaps because of the early hour, the Concord police hadn't received reports of any other sightings.