Look, I know you think it is all bs. However, I personally with witness have encountered a ufo(s) 3 times in my life. The first was in 1984 in upstate NY. I was at sleep-away camp. Me and a friend left a dance at the Canteen one night and walk about 1/4 mile way back to the bunk. In the middle of our walk we heard a low buzzing noise…like hmmmmmmmmmmmmm sound. We looked up and noticed that there was some kind of black craft slowly…very slowly moving forward and covering up the sky (the stars)…it was the size of a football field. It was directly overhead…we freaked out, screamed and ran as fast as we could to our bunk (i was 13 at the time). Many other people saw this too!
Second time was when I was with my mom about 4-5 years ago driving down the west side highway in NYC. Off to the right, where Jersey is we BOTH noticed 4-5 whiteish disc type craft a few miles away in broad daylight…every one on the highway also had slowed down into traffic to take a look.
Third time was a few months ago. I live in South Florida and was driving my kids to school as usual at 7:30 am. I live in a closed community of 415 homes and there were several people standing outside looking up. I stopped my car and saw 3 white white discs in the distance moving together slowly…the all of a sudden it stopped and went in the other direction (backwards) and disappeard in less than one second…like “poof” GONE.
A link to the column is appreciated. Providing one can be as simple as pasting the URL into your post, making sure to leave a blank space on either side of it. Like so: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_065.html
Sounds like UFOs: unidentified flying objects. However, if you start positing extraterrestrial origin, I’ll start laughing.
Before the inevitable question comes up, no, I am not going to theorize about what you thought you saw. I wasn’t there.
By the way, are you aware that there is an Air Force base in NJ, and that 4-5 years ago our (2001-2002) our skies were being patrolled by fighter jets. I saw more than a few, including one incredibly low pass of F16s underneath the lower Manhattan office I was working in at the time.
The column wants a little updating on the fairy-photographs incident. There were two girls, and they actually confessed to faking them in 1981.
Frankly, when I saw the photographs in 1967, thumbing through a library copy of Conan Doyle’s book, I knew at once that they were fake, not only because they were obviously flat images, but because they embodied notions of faerie no older than the Victorians.
I watched part of a UFO special on TV a couple of years ago (can’t remember the network). I almost fell off the couch laughing when they showed film of a “UFO” sighting which showed a nightime picture of a pair of linked bright lights slowly moving away from the viewer and slowly rising as they moved. It was VERY clearly a view from the rear of an F4 Phantom jet fighter taking off - the pair of lights were the twin jet engines seen from behind and the characteristic bent tail and wingtips of the F4 were outlined against the sky glow. The apparent slowness was simply due to the angle of view and the distance from the viewer.
Truly an “unidentified” flying object, but only because the show’s producers obviously had made no attempt to even try to identify it.
Quick hijack: in one of the pictures, shown here, WTF’s up with Elsie’s hand? The site says there weren’t any problems with exposure, and they didn’t do any retouching afterwards…
I’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky. I’ve seen unidentified objects in the fridge. In neither case do I assume that they have something to do with space aliens.
I just listened to George Carlin’s routine about refrigerators. If he found an empty plate in there, then something had to be moving.
Back to the OP. I noticed he gave distances for the stuff he saw. In fact, judging distances of things in the sky is very difficult. Plus, how does one know something is a disk that far away. Balloons in certain light might look like disks, and moving to a different current might cause the behavior described. Of course one can’t be sure.
I’ll stick with Arthur C. Clarkes criteria for knowing that UFOs are from outer space - you need to see their Mars (or Alpha Centauri) license plate.
