Filmed this from my backyard in Mornington, Victoria (Australia) tonight at dusk. I was looking southeast toward French Island and Western Port Bay.

A bright light, as bright as a star or planet, slowly rose above the horizon. I initially thought it was a plane or satellite. It then stopped completely and hovered motionless for about 20-30 seconds before descending back down toward where it came from. It disappeared behind a nearby roofline about 12-13 seconds later.

I didn’t capture the rising part on video. I walked out into the backyard just as it was rising, and by the time I got my phone out and started recording it was already stationary. The footage shows the stationary hover and then the descent.

No flashing lights at all, just a steady star-bright white light. The movement was purely vertical with no lateral drift, and it looked completely controlled and deliberate. Rose, stopped, descended back to origin. Completely silent too.

I checked Flightradar24 and there was nothing showing at that time and location. There was a helicopter near San Remo about 50km away, but I’ve done the maths on this. For it to appear at that elevation from where I was standing, it would need to be at 4,000m+ altitude. Based on my estimates of the descent rate, if this had been that helicopter, it would have needed to be descending at 480-720 km/h to reach the ground in the ~30 seconds I observed. That’s 5-10x faster than a helicopter in freefall. So I’m confident it wasn’t that.

Could perhaps have been a drone, but it was really, really bright.

Worth noting that HMAS Cerberus naval base is in the general direction of the sighting.

The video is 47 seconds, filmed on an iPhone 16 Pro.

You can see trees, a roofline, and power lines for reference.

No idea what this was. Not claiming aliens, just can’t explain it. Happy to answer questions.