Careening Planet, Mothership, Portal or Cloud? It's A Cloud. It's Always a Cloud.

On the morning of February 21, 2025 at approximately 7:08 am, on location in Wabaunsee County, Kansas, I witnessed a phantom planet drawn close to the earth.  Or, a mothership in the east.  Or, an enormous portal that dwarfed the sun.  Or, I was dreaming. 

I found my glasses and got out of bed to look through the window, the upper pane that has no screen.  What was I seeing?

It was nearly sunrise,  but partially hidden by the timber behind my house was an enormous orb. It  appeared to be a near planet, the way they are depicted in science fiction movies. It was electrifying! Had Mars been knocked out of orbit into a collision with the earth?  Probably not. (Would we not have felt a disturbance in the force?)

Were the extraterrestrials at long last returning to earth, the gigantic spherical mothership parked between me and the sun?  No.  Millions of people would have already seen it.  Someone would surely have called me by now. (That would be news worth more than a text, right?)

Still awash in the brain waves of the dream state, maybe I was capable of seeing a portal of space/time, or a spiritual gateway - in my pasture. Maybe.  (My dogs were behaving as if I was pretty darned wide awake.)

I went to the other east windows to try to get a better view.  The orb did not shift or change from a different angle so it was, in fact, very large or very far away.  I decided to just observe it.  I thought maybe I should try to photograph it.  If it was real, it would show up in a photo.

So, I photographed it, knowing the true size, the strangeness, or the wonder of it, whatever it was, would not translate.  It was underwhelming in the photo.  I waited until the sun was up then photographed it again to get a comparison in size.

Ultimately, I thought it had to be a cloud.  (A perfectly round, featureless, unchanging cloud that I have never witnessed in all the decades of cloud watching I have logged?) Occam's razor instructs us to prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions. For a few glorious moments, I thought the world had shifted.  

  

Here is the photo of the strange anomaly.  I tweaked every aspect I could to try to better see it. In this extreme zoom it is pixilated but it was smooth and perfectly round to the eye.  

Here is the sun rising behind it, for comparison.  Using my circle templates, I measured the "mothership" as 1-7/8" on the screen while the diameter of the sun measures 11/32".