CIH, I know exactly what you mean. One of the pictures I saw of it, I would have sworn that the end of the bag was open and that the object was a shiny metal but tonight I was going back through some of the original pix from WRAL and revisited that picture or one very similar and it looks as though what I previously thought was metal is now looking much more like a piece of brown paper attached to the bottom and perhaps a shadow created by sunlight shining through the paper except for the object inside the bag which is too thick to allow the light to penetrate.
It's picture #9 here...
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/photos/story/1144014.html
You can right click on it to zoom.
I am starting to think that it may be a cornice afterall. I admit that it was the shininess that I thought I was seeing before that made the cornice theory unimaginable.
