I’m sitting at the beach right now, and dead center above me, a white dot appeared. It’s mostly stationary, occasionally moving back and forth, apparently along the same line. It’s either distant or small enough to look point-like, and I can’t tell if it’s lit itself, or just reflects the sunlight (at first, I thought it emitted light, but now I don’t think so).
It’s been joined by two other dots, showing much the same behavior.
Best guess, right now: either high-flying seagulls (or another bird), or maybe balloons of some kind, perhaps from some celebration or another.
They’ve disappeared in the meantime; I haven’t seen them move away, they were just gone when I looked up just now.
Could be, or it could just be artifacts of your own vision - if you stare up at a blank, light-coloured sky, you may see all kinds of specks and stuff - some of it is inside the jelly of your eyes, other bits of it are the result of features on your retinas, and other bits are purely in your brain.
No, my wife sees them as well, so they’re neither in my eyes, nor in my head.
Another has appeared and disappeared in the meantime, I tried to take a picture, but I’ll have to wait till I’m home to see whether anything’s visible.
Also, I think we can rule out balloons—they neither move with the clouds, nor do their movements have any obvious correlation to one another.
A drone? Stars? I’ve noticed, on rare occasions, a solitary white dot near the zenith in a clear sky. I’d explain any movement as a form of autokinetic effect, an example of which was shown to hilarious effect in the HBO series, “Generation Kill,” here: Generation Kill - tank "overrun" scene - YouTube (Here, the Marines see very distant lights on the horizon that they believe are moving, and from that believe they are going to be overrun by armored vehicles. They call in a large airstrike to deal with it, which ends up bombing the living shit out of mostly empty desert. The comedy stems from their attempts in the clear light of the next day to justify the large expenditure of time and ordnance.)
This doesn’t disprove winds. Wind strength and direction can vary quite a bit over altitude. Saw a good example of this a couple weeks ago where the lower clouds were moving quite rapidly at right angles to the clouds directly above them.
Even a group of balloons can sometimes scatter quite a bit due to not all rising together and hitting winds at different times.
Humans are really terrible judges of sizes, distances and movements of things in the sky.
I once saw a moving light in the night sky. It was moving N. to S. like a polar satellite. Oddly it’s path seem to “swerve” around stars in its way. The brain does odd things.
Possible, but then, my wife and me agreed on the direction of movement—although I can’t discount a priming effect, I didn’t ask her to just report what direction of movement she saw to see if it matched what I saw.
Yes, but I wouldn’t expect that much relative movement, backtracking, and so on. Doesn’t mean I’m discounting the possibility, but I’d assign it a low confidence right now.
Barring other ideas, I think ‘bird’ is the most likely explanation. Too high up for me to perceive the flapping of wings, seemingly standing still in a crosswind (although for impressively long periods of time), vanishing due to flying even higher, or just plain and simple me not paying attention.
(Even out here in a “backwater” I was surprised a few years ago at a wedding to see a small drone flitting around, taking a video which was projected onto a large screen.)
A mysterious white dot I saw at the zenith once turned out to be a weather balloon. Your sighting might be some sort of scientific experiment attached to a balloon, and since you say that there was more than one, it might have something to do with a school. Maybe just tagged balloons hoping for someone to retrieve and return the tag. Or they might be some sort of party or celebration balloons far up in the sky. Birds are a good answer too, and if you are happy with that, it’s your sighting.
If you give us your location, we’ll have a couple of [del] agents[/del] representatives come over to speak to you. Any photographic or audio recordings would be greatly appreciated. If you’ve spoken to any one else about this, have them present as well (it will save us a great deal of time). We’ll treat any communications about this incident with the greatest of care.:eek:
Could be seagulls. I guess it depends on how high they can fly. I don’t know how high they can go.
Many times when I am outside I will hear honking (almost sounds like dogs barking sometimes) and I’ll look up to see two or three Canada geese flying over just above rooftop level. One day when I was coming home from work I got out of my car in the driveway and heard the familiar honking, looked around at rooftop level to see where the geese were, then finally looked straight up and there was a HUGE flock way the hell up in the sky. I am a perfect example of ftg’s statement that people are terrible judges of size, speed, and distance, but that was about where I expect to see airplanes flying, not birds.
:eek: