Rants From The Rookery: UFOs?

Sunday, April 29, 2007

UFOs?

Aliens? Swamp gas? Large untethered bloated gasbag talking pundits?

A commercial airline pilot has reported seeing two unidentified flying objects in the sky near Guernsey.

The bright yellow flat disc shapes, estimated to be twice the size of a Boeing 737, were spotted on Monday, 12 to 15 miles north east of the island.

[snip]

"The MoD's UFO case files contain several reports from civil and military pilots, some of which were correlated by radar. This is the sort of sighting that is taken seriously and should be investigated thoroughly.

"While most UFOs can be explained as misidentifications of aircraft, weather balloons, satellites and suchlike, a small percentage are more difficult to explain. This is one of the most intriguing sightings I've heard about in recent years."

6 comments:

Anonymous said...: Could be ball lightning. I've seen those before, and if you can't identify them then they certainly are UFOs.; 4/29/07, 7:13 PM
ellroon said...: Ooo cool! Did the ball lightning change colors and shift in the air? I saw something like that when I was a teen. I then went into a report on UFOs a believer and came out a disbeliever. I was so disappointed....; 4/29/07, 9:49 PM
Steve Bates said...: Oh, good. I was afraid our alien friends had abandoned us. :)

I guess I'm pretty much what you call a disbeliever. But I admit to wishing UFOs were extraterrestrial.

Technological types like me face a real dilemma, because as much as we'd like them to be "real," UFOs face formidable obstacles that have to be explained if one is going to assume they come from "out there."

Sigh. We could use a benevolent ET intervention about now...

I've never seen a UFO. The only phenomenon I've ever observed directly is a phosphorescent tide. I was sober; some of my companions... well, OK, they'd dropped acid, which I never did. One young woman came to me and asked if those sparkles in the water were real. As tempted as I was to answer, "what sparkles," I told her they were real. I hope I didn't spoil her trip.; 4/30/07, 12:26 AM
ellroon said...: Lol! You were very kind about the sparkles. Reminds me of the stoner surfer talking about his religious experience on a midnight beach where he was surrounded by this brilliant light...

(turned out to be a spotlight from the helicopter police....)

It would be so much fun (?) to have flying saucers and aliens and all. But I cannot accept the Roswell Area 51 conspiracies, the mysterious inexplicable events as proof.

Logic and science always kick in at the last moment. My leap of faith is that we will be able to understand and explain everything in the universe given time.; 4/30/07, 8:38 AM
Anonymous said...: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke said.

Yes, the ball lightning I saw changed color and shifted through air. In fact I saw three of them in one storm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Two of them I barely saw, they were on the opposite side of the building where we were (in a dormitory) and I only saw them for an instant. The other one I got to watch for probably 15 seconds. It hung in the air, about the size of a basketball, it floated towards the building and down towards the telephone lines while changing colors and then paralleled above the telephone lines until it ran into the building, at which point the power went off for a bit.

I was surprised to learn later that many scientists did not believe in the reality of ball lightning. It was one of the more amusing things to relate, when apparently ball lightning was observed by scientists at some largish conference and it was simply undeniable at that point.; 4/30/07, 2:43 PM
ellroon said...: Thanks, whig! This must have been what I saw. A light that looked like a helicopter, moving oddly. I found it hard to judge exactly where it was in relation to me. As I stood at my window, it passed at a distance by the side of my house, changing colors as it flared by.

It could have been running the electric lines, but it seemed further away than that. I'm going to do more research on ball lightning.; 5/1/07, 10:20 AM