© Chelly MilzewskiThis image of the unidentified flying object was was captured by reader Chelly Milzewski on Saltwater Creek Rd in Maryborough about 5.20pm on Monday.
Toogoom resident Maggie MacLeod sparked the influx of reports yesterday when she posted about the "bright, comet-like" UFO on the Fraser Coast Chronicle Facebook page.
"It was going down, then sideways and then the tail disappeared," she said.
"I went up to a group of people on the beach and pointed it out to them ... by this time it was a big red ball in the sky near where the sun had set.
"It was virtually staying still ... before all of a sudden, the tail came out and it shot off and disappeared.
"It did not fade as one would expect after viewing it for 40 minutes."
Maryborough's Chelly Milzweski reported seeing "what appeared to be a burning flame" on the horizon towards Hervey Bay and captured it on camera.
Penlan Lassy from Urraween also saw it and described it as a "bright light moving quickly with a small trail" that was "too small to be a plane".
A few suggested the UFO could have been a high-level plane with vapour trails or space junk entering the atmosphere.
Comment: The eyewitness descriptions are very interesting because they synch with historical accounts of comets doing very strange things high up in the sky during past times of increased cometary flux. Clearly then the ancients were not imagining things... they were witnessing the electrical interaction of cometary bodies that appear to change direction, stand still, suddenly begin spinning, etc. as they discharge the Earth's atmosphere.
See here and here for recent videos of comet fragments pulling off spectacular celestial maneuvers. Note in particular this video report from a very similar event almost exactly three years ago in the same part of Australia.