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 Post subject: Any Good UFO Stories?
PostPosted: June 23rd, 2021, 7:07 pm 
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Well, since it's a timely news issue, and some of us still need some diversions to keep us occupied until full re-opening, does anyone have any good UFO/UAP stories about anything unusual seen in the night skies wherever the waters have led us?

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PostPosted: June 23rd, 2021, 11:24 pm 
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Yeah.

I was, oh I suppose, 16 or so, so this was 20 or 25 years ago. It was a dark, moonless, and clear night. This was at a seasonal campground where we had a trailer.

I was outside having a smoke and staring at the sky, as many of us are driven to do. I noticed this dancing light in the sky. It was kind of - blinking, like a satellite does sometimes, or a high altitude jet before you hear it. But this blinking light was stationary, kind of blinking around, then it went out, then reappeared, just a bit left, blinking around again, then disappearing, then reappearing and blinking around some more.

So I yelled into the trailer, "Hey mom! Come check this out!". She came out and stared at the same blinking, hovering, stationary blinky point in the sky.

Then, I shit you not - it disappeared for ten or fifteen seconds, reappeared, remained stationary and fully lit for a couple of seconds, and then just... skooched - like a bat out of hell. From one side of the sky to the other, we watched this point of light trace across the sky, leaving no trail behind it. It took maybe five seconds to cross the entire sky from west to east. It was faster than anything I'd ever seen in the sky before or since.

"Well WTF was that?"

"Alien spacecraft seems the most plausible explanation:".

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PostPosted: June 24th, 2021, 6:39 am 
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Nothing Alien or otherworldly here, but out on Lake Ontario one evening when I was about 19 and I was just staring out into space.

Suddenly this bright orange flame is traveling up into the sky, and it just keeps going and going and going.

Must have been a satellite launch from a military ship? Test missile? It would have been on the American side (maybe around Rochester) as far as I could tell. I keep my eye peeled on the news papers after that for a few days and no one mentioned anything. As far as I know only myself and my friend are the only ones who saw it.

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PostPosted: June 24th, 2021, 7:04 am 
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Fellow Skywatchers,

This isn't a canoeing story, as it happened in mid-Winter.

I was standing on the ice of Lake Kushog about 11 pm on a January evening when I spotted a bright light near the horizon that was flashing a sequence of colours: blue, green, yellow, red. Very different from the red, green and white lights on an aircraft. Each colour was distinct with a moment of no light between the colour flashes.

The light(s) appeared to me to be no more than a mile or two away about 500 feet high. It seemed to be stationary for the most part but would move back and forth a bit. Over time it seemed to drift slowly.

At first I thought it might be a "fire lantern". I had launched a few of these when I was a teenager, using a dry cleaners' transparent plastic bag with a light framework of balsa wood and soda straws holding a heat source -- usually a couple of candles inside. The heat expanded the bag, which eventually rose as a hot-air balloon into the night sky. It looked impressive. The flame of the candles would flicker and it drifted slowly in a breeze.

What I saw near Kushog Lake resembled that somewhat, but the colours were much more pronounced.

This was before the days of drones with flashing lights.

"WTF IS that?" I watched for about 15 minutes before I figured it out.

When I was a child I was interested in astronomy and had learned the constellations. With that retained knowledge, I realised that the light was the star Arcturus -- the second brightest star in the northern hemisphere. Being low on the horizon, it was shining through layers of Earth's atmosphere, causing the strange colour effect.

I'm glad there was an explanation for the apparition, otherwise it would have been a fascinating UFO story.

Over the years I've seen other unfamiliar things in the sky that I wasn't able to explain in any conventional way, but I doubt that they were alien visitors -- there wasn't anything to indicate that.

I'm both open-minded and skeptical when it comes to UFOs or the paranormal.

- JF -


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PostPosted: July 2nd, 2021, 8:53 am 
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Never seen one myself... here's a sighting report from Ontario, in the Globe and Mail this morning. Canoe trip, too.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... ame-since/

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PostPosted: July 5th, 2021, 11:07 am 
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Location: Freeland, Maryland USA
I missed this off-topic topic, but have had a couple of unexplained encounters, and one not so unexplained.

As a kid I was walking one night along a dirt road past a wide cornfield in the middle of rural nowhere when a blindingly white light shot up, vertically at great speed and vanished in seconds into the dark night sky. I was 11 or 12 and thought “Well that was odd”. I was not, to the best of my recollection, probed.

In 1978 I was on a cross country trip with two companions when, in the middle of the nowhere eastern Wyoming or Colorado plains, we saw something very similar, a fast moving bright white streak “launch”. Given our location I figured that one to be some military rocket test. Or the start of WWIII.

Until a half hour later when, on a long straight level stretch of deserted blacktop, we came upon a car, resting on its roof in the middle of the road.

Accident? There was only one car. There was no dead cow or deer. The car was unoccupied, windows up, doors closed but unlocked. With long skid marks from locked up brakes, but the skid marks ended DIRECTLY under the wheels. The car was intact, undented, undamaged, not even a broken window. WTF and how the hell? Someone got probed, or at least that’s what they told their parents later that night.

I have had one experience with a mysterious flying object of explained origin. We were on the beach in Miami one night when a UFO slowly rose into the sky, trailing different colored lights that moved and swayed from side to side. It gained increasing altitude over the course of 20 minutes or so, reaching a considerable height. Four of us witnessed it, and the colored lights were still plainly visible to anyone looking up into the night sky. As the lights rose and swayed they seemed to twinkle.

It had a visible radar signature; the highest flying helicopter I have ever seen came over, passing approximately where the weird colored lights were twinkling, and lit up a brilliant searchlight. At that very moment the “UFO”, which had been fairly stationary if still rising, took off like a scalded cat, heading west at considerable speed.

Definitely a UFO. Or visitors from our own planet with an identified flying object.

The earthly visitors were us, flying a DIY “UFO”. We had sent up a kite train, three kites attached at 100 yard intervals to a single string, so each kite was carrying only its part of the total string weight, able to achieve high elevation. Attached to the string between the kites were colored glow-stick Cyalumes and, due to available material desperation, some long pieces of aluminum foil to act as a tail.

We had flown those before, at night off more remote beaches, sans the tinfoil tail and not lofted three kite-train high. Sometimes raising them from behind the dunes to fly over coastal campgrounds, just to hear a startled “Martha, quick, come look!”.

I had some decent quality kites and line at the time, not Dollar Store bat kites and cotton string, so we had always brought them down to retrieved the kite and string. Well, not always retrieved; we had one single kite cyalume rig abruptly nose dive, plummeting straight down into a crowded campground where folks were watching and wondering. To some audible consternation; we skedaddled.

About the time the chopper arrived off Miami beach the kite train had achieved such altitude and wind velocity that it was pulling like a SOB, and I couldn’t control the speed with which the string unraveled. Burning my fingers I wrapped it in the sleeve of my coat, and as the friction burned through the 60/40 fabric the scorched string parted ways, so the kite train was now rising fast, dangling a couple hundred yards of stabilizing string “tail”.

That “UFO” took off, heading due west at a high rate of speed. The chopper did not follow. We did not get our kites back. We did again skedaddle.

I checked the Miami papers for a couple days, no mention of a UFO. It’s a conspiracy I tell you!

johnfrum wrote:
The light(s) appeared to me to be no more than a mile or two away about 500 feet high. It seemed to be stationary for the most part but would move back and forth a bit. Over time it seemed to drift slowly.


John, I swear I have never been to Lake Kushog. The truth is out there.


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PostPosted: July 6th, 2021, 6:40 am 
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Mike,

I never flew kites at night -- sounds like they can make dandy fake UFOs.

Back in the day (long ago), our whole and only reason to send things up in the sky at night was to "blow people's minds".

I don't think we ever made the news, though.

Fortunately, no ground fires were started although at times burning bits of the "fire lantern" would fall off.

Being a Canadian immigrant from the US, I guess I qualify as an "alien".

- JF -


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PostPosted: July 6th, 2021, 1:11 pm 
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Location: Freeland, Maryland USA
johnfrum wrote:
I never flew kites at night -- sounds like they can make dandy fake UFOs.

Back in the day (long ago), our whole and only reason to send things up in the sky at night was to "blow people's minds".


Night kites do make for an interesting visual. We first did that illuminated night kite stuff in the early ‘70’s, for our own trippy amazement. I don’t know if cyalume glow sticks even existed back then, the first ones we launched used little pen flashlights, and we soon discovered the “kite train” business to carry the weight of more than one light.

One of those pen light unhooked from elevation and plummeted straight down. Ohhs and ahhs freaky, but then everything was psychedelic that night.

Before I got decent quality kites and string we did fly cheap Dollar Store plastic bat-kite trains using multiple 100 yard rolls of crappy kite string, which was a 2-person PITA to take down and re-roll, but still got a series of
cheapo kite trains up a long damn ways.

BTW, the kite train altitude record: “Highest altitude by a kite train – 31,955 feet – 9,740 meters. Eight kites flew over Lindenburg on 1 August 1919”. I somehow doubt those were a plastic Dollar Store Little Mermaid kites.

https://www.kites.co.nz/pdffiles/World% ... ecords.pdf

Lastly, don’t do the aluminum foil radar signature trick. That was unintentional, the aluminum foil was all we had with us and we needed more tail. I worried about the foil finally coming down on a power line and blacking out half of the Florida panhandle.

I have always wondered what the hell the Miami airport/military/DEA thought when a slow moving. nearly stationary object appeared on their radar. Load of coke coming in via dirigible?


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PostPosted: July 8th, 2021, 6:45 am 
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Joined: June 28th, 2001, 7:00 pm
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Location: Freeland, Maryland USA
johnfrum wrote:
I was standing on the ice of Lake Kushog about 11 pm on a January evening when I spotted a bright light near the horizon that was flashing a sequence of colours: blue, green, yellow, red. Very different from the red, green and white lights on an aircraft. Each colour was distinct with a moment of no light between the colour flashes.

The light(s) appeared to me to be no more than a mile or two away about 500 feet high. It seemed to be stationary for the most part but would move back and forth a bit. Over time it seemed to drift slowly.


John, I was thinking about your description of the different colored flashing lights with a moment of no color between flashes and, if you’ll accept Canadian cousin kiters flying stuff at night, may have an explanation.

We have a Luci Color light, bought on a whim. It has 8 different colors, with a setting that flashes between each color for a few seconds, with a moment of darkness before the next color comes on.

https://mpowerd.com/products/lucicolor

That Luci Color is small, very lightweight, and would be easy to loft on a kite at night.

Thanks, I haven’t sent up a night kite in years, but next trip to the shore the kites and Luci Color are coming with me.


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PostPosted: July 31st, 2021, 10:41 am 
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UFO Buffs,

I'll share one more story with you although it's even farther from canoeing and, by definition, doesn't even involve any UFOs.

Some years ago I had a condominium in Don Mills on the 24th floor facing south into the Don Valley and beyond.

One afternoon I was looking out at some birds (gulls) frolicking around, circling in the sky maybe a kilometre away. It was very hot and humid -- the atmosphere felt thick.

While I watched the gulls, to my amazement some of them morphed into silvery blobs. The lighting conditions and atmospherics must have been just right for the effect to happen, as the birds kept morphing back and forth between gulls and blobs.

It wasn't really a UFO sighting because I knew they were birds and them changing was just a sort of mirage. The impression of silvery, reflective discs (or "tic-tacs") was strong.

The other thing that struck me was if I had just seen the discs in the sky and not realized they were birds, it would have been impossible to judge distance or size -- they could have been far away and huge.

I've never heard of this exact explanation for any UFO sightings and it must be a rare apparition in any case, but I offer it for what it's worth.

Watch the skies!

- JF -


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PostPosted: July 31st, 2021, 1:03 pm 
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A "natural" UFO.
One evening sitting around the campfire with my son and a few of my friends (a buddy canoe trip) someone noticed a movement in the darkening skies up between the conifers. The dusk quickly settled making it hard to distinguish what the shadow was darting thru the trees. We decided it was not out across the lake but in fact much closer, just out of fire light range and playing with our imaginations. It made no sound as it floated from tree to tree around our clearing. No matter how much we tried to focus on the dark ghostly movement we could not find it in the gloom. We agreed to all bend our heads toward the fire and "pretend" not to be interested in our elusive visitor, and we all directed our periphery vision up to the trees. It baffled us until our nighttime guest eventually landed on a tree trunk and crept into the light, and then we finally saw our shy visitor, a rather curious flying squirrel. It didn't linger long. Here for a minute and then gone.


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PostPosted: October 27th, 2022, 2:21 pm 
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Sky-watchers,

I'll add one more that's more of a classic UFO story, although once again: no canoeing.

This was long ago -- I'd say about 1967. It was back in Columbus, Ohio, observed by me from the Ohio State campus while I was driving.

There were two lights about the brightness of stars, just pinpoints but bright enough to attract attention. They seemed to be moving in and out of the clouds and seemed to be related to each other although moving somewhat haphazardly too. The impression I had was that they were like lights on each end of a long object like a zeppelin tumbling around in the wind, but although I tried hard to make out an actual object between them, I can't really say I saw that.

I was driving at the time and I observed the apparition through an open car window -- it wasn't a reflection on window glass. I noticed that it had caught the attention of pedestrians who were pointing at it.

It did get mentioned on the local news the next day. Apparently it had been seen by a lot of people at that early evening hour. Spokesmen at the local Lockbourne Air Force Base said it must have been the lights of midair refueling exercises that were going on at the approximate time.

That's the last I heard of it. It was very hard for me to connect that explanation with what I saw and at the time I thought it was a bullshit attempt to explain it away.

Although I'll admit that I was headed to a campus bar for a night of drinking. I was a sober witness at the time.

-JF-


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