CARRBORO — Roy Mars was peeing in his compost last weekend -- it adds nitrogen -- when he looked up and saw something streak across the sky.

“It looked like a shooting star,” the custom furniture maker said. But he’s seen those before, he said, and it wasn’t one.

“It was a streak of light that started going over my head,” he said.

As he turned his head and arched his back, it seemed to slow down and went from a streak to a perfect three-pointed triangle. Then it disappeared over the tree line.

The whole thing left Mars a little “wigged out.”

He wants to know what he saw.

Police received no calls about a sighting, and two military bases said they didn’t have or don’t think they had any local flyovers Nov. 3, the night Mars saw ... whatever he saw.

(Seymour Johnson Air Force Base did conduct low-altitude military training over Alamance and Orange counties Nov. 1, when some residents heard a loud roar.)

The Morehead Planetarium and Science Center didn’t get any calls, either.

“A lot of people do spend a lot of time looking at the sky, and when they do happen to notice something they don’t know what they’re looking at,” said Amy Sayle, current science program manager at the planetarium.

But she didn’t know what it might be either.

A satellite would have been a steady white light, Sayle said; a meteor, a brief flash.

If you look on the Internet, as Mars did, you’ll find plenty of references to triangular dark shapes in the sky, some with lights, some without.

The National UFO Reporting Center gets those reports, too.

“There are a great many sighting on our website, and they’re intriguing,” director Peter Davenport said.

Mars sent him a photo he found online ( blogs.newsobserver.com/orangechat/home) that looked like what he saw.

“It’s not a meteor,” Davenport said. “It appears not to be an aircraft, certainly not an aircraft flying legally. ... So that leaves it in the basket of the unknown.”

Several days after the incident, Mars remained unsettled.

Schultz: 919-932-2003