How loud is a blimp?

I’m gonna bet the words appear on the right and scroll to the left. They’re very hard to read if presented backwards. :wink:

I saw my first UFO about 4 years ago. I had just walked out of a restaurant into a foggy night with a light drizzle falling. And there in the dark sky out beyond the parking lot was a strange blue-white light in an odd shape, just hanging there.

I stopped and stared for a few seconds and couldn’t really figure out what it was. I had that same strange sensation of “This *can’t *be something unusual, but at the same time, what the heck is it?”

I was beginning to lose faith that it was something ordinary, convincing myself it was something weird, remarkable, maybe even dangerous. Then suddenly it hit me.

It was a parking lot light. One of a dozen identical lights on tall poles in the lot. There was a gap in the housing so some light was leaking out the top in addition to the usual downward illumination. And the housing was square and close enough that the bright area was clearly rectangular, not just a point. It was all of 150 feet away.

I’d walked out of that restaurant dozens of times, usually after dark. And seen that light post and fixture each of those dozens of times. But somehow the fog hid the post and fuzzed up the shape enough to make the whole thing real mysterious.

I’ve spent a life and a career looking at the sky from many vantage points. And I finally get fooled by a stupid light post in a familiar parking lot.

Human perception is a funny and fallible thing.