I saw a UFO last night...

Re: Re: Re: I saw a UFO last night...

Moose said:
[edit: Dang, I knew I should have read the rest of the thread.]
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I looked at my post today and wondered what the hell I was babbling about. That was tiredness and the alcohol I had with my evening meal, hence my apparently nonsense observation. Sorry about that. :o

Funnily enough, you're actually right that I am used to seeing planes from the right side. :)
 
thatguywhojuggles said:
I was driving through Portland last night and noticed something in the night sky. I pulled over and got out of my car to get a better look. I saw three objects. One was a light that just stood still low near the horizon. I am guessing it was Venus, but if it was, I have never seen Venus so bright. The second object was some lights that were moving through the sky, most likely an airplane. The third object, however was the one I could not identify. It was dark, and the only thing that definitely stood out were the red lights on the ends of it. It looked like a huge airplane wing--but JUST the wing, and no body. And it moved very slow, and didn't make any noise at all. I thought it was a glider of some sorts, but couldn't be sure.
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A little more data could resolve some of these lights. UFO reports are notorious for lack of details that could resolve many of them. I suspect that your bright light was Jupiter but you did not give date, time, direction, or elevation angle for the object so it is impossible to say. Venus is just past conjunction with the sun and is just emerging into the evening sky so I doubt this was the source.

As for the dark object, I have seen a lot of people "connect the dots" with lights and suspect something was dark behind it. Dr. Hartmann called this the "airship effect". I am not saying this was the situation in your case but it could have been. Again, details of your observation are missing and it is difficult to determine any stimulus.
 
Re: Re: Re: I saw a UFO last night...

thatguywhojuggles said:
ufo.jpg


This is kinda what it looked like to me... it just looked like a flying wing seen from the underside, with two red lights on the ends of the wings.

If there was more to the shape of this (like a airplane body) I couldn't see it.

The strangest part of it was how low and slow it seemed to be flying. It was headed in the direction of the airport, so I am assuming it is an airplane or glider of some type.
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The picture kinda looks like the "Kite" that NASA is working on for Mars recon (and limited application as an inner-stratosphere Sattellite) cant remember the name of the program though.

It was by the same guys who had done the man powered flight over the English Channel (was on Scientific American(?) with Alan Alda).

IIRC the wingspan is just over 100 feet, definately has a shape like you have drawn, whether they would be testing that near you I have no idea (the tests in the show were in Mojave or Edwards AFB IIRC).
Ill do some hunting around (Because it's more fun than real work) and see if I cant get some more info or photos
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: I saw a UFO last night...

Archangel said:
IIRC the wingspan is just over 100 feet, definately has a shape like you have drawn, whether they would be testing that near you I have no idea (the tests in the show were in Mojave or Edwards AFB IIRC).
Ill do some hunting around (Because it's more fun than real work) and see if I cant get some more info or photos
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okey doke it was Scientific American Frontiers; Ep1109, with the Pathfinder Project.

THE ETERNAL WING


ALAN ALDA (NARRATION) Dawn in California's Mojave Desert. Almost 20 years after the Gossamer Condor flew into history, its direct descendent is being rolled out for another historic flight. The Pathfinder is a flying wing, powered by the sun. Built by Paul MacCready's company, Aerovironment, the Pathfinder has been prepared for this moment by project manager Bob Curtin.

ALAN ALDA It's very long. How long is this wing?

BOB CURTIN That's a hundred-foot wing span.

ALAN ALDA A hundred feet, and it's all wing, right?

BOB CURTIN That's right. It's all wing, there's no surfaces in back like a normal airplane.

ALAN ALDA Why did you make it all wing?

BOB CURTIN Well it's the optimum shape for something that you need to, to make very light, and collect a lot of solar energy. It happens to be a wing.

ALAN ALDA (NARRATION) Every inch of the wing is covered with wafer-thin solar cells. Even so, there's not exactly power to spare.
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It's solar powered though, so Im not sure if they'd have added bigger batteries in the couple of years since this episode was written to allow for flight at night.

The other problem though is Mojave (from my recollection) is nowhere near Oregon (unless there is a Portland in CA as well)

*edited to add the missing word "bigger"
 
Re: Re: I saw a UFO last night...

Astrophotographer said:
A little more data could resolve some of these lights. UFO reports are notorious for lack of details that could resolve many of them. I suspect that your bright light was Jupiter but you did not give date, time, direction, or elevation angle for the object so it is impossible to say. Venus is just past conjunction with the sun and is just emerging into the evening sky so I doubt this was the source.

As for the dark object, I have seen a lot of people "connect the dots" with lights and suspect something was dark behind it. Dr. Hartmann called this the "airship effect". I am not saying this was the situation in your case but it could have been. Again, details of your observation are missing and it is difficult to determine any stimulus.
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If I gave any more detail at this point, I would be giving mostly flawed detail. I believe human memory starts to fall apart right away.

But as to the time. It was around 10:00pm, and the bright light I assumed was Venus was very low in the sky, and southeast.
 
I remember a few years back in the UK, Richard Branson (Virgin boss) caused a bit of a stir by flying a blimp around lit up and vaguely shaped like a UFO at twilight.
There were 100's of calls to local news about it until he eventually came clean about it being a publicity stunt - more than likely, it was something similar - a blimp, glider, crane, etc. Without photographic evidence, I'm sorry, but we can't trust your memory of the event, as we all know, people tend to remember things that never happened, so there is a chance that your brain is adding details that weren't there.
 
Re: Re: Re: I saw a UFO last night...

thatguywhojuggles said:
If I gave any more detail at this point, I would be giving mostly flawed detail. I believe human memory starts to fall apart right away.

But as to the time. It was around 10:00pm, and the bright light I assumed was Venus was very low in the sky, and southeast.
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Yes, that would be Jupiter, since I think it'd be rising in the southeast at that time.

There are some details that I'm sure you can remember that won't be flawed. The four red lights, were they over a town? What sort of angle above the horizon were they? Did they flash? Were they bright? That sort of thing.

It's an interesting mystery. :)
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: I saw a UFO last night...

wipeout said:
Yes, that would be Jupiter, since I think it'd be rising in the southeast at that time.

There are some details that I'm sure you can remember that won't be flawed. The four red lights, were they over a town? What sort of angle above the horizon were they? Did they flash? Were they bright? That sort of thing.

It's an interesting mystery. :)
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The red lights were directly over me, and I was in a town, I was in south east Portland OR. The lights did not flash. They moved as if attatched to a giant wing.

Again, the more time passes, the worse my memory is getting.

:)
 
Re: Re: Re: I saw a UFO last night...

thatguywhojuggles said:
If I gave any more detail at this point, I would be giving mostly flawed detail. I believe human memory starts to fall apart right away.

But as to the time. It was around 10:00pm, and the bright light I assumed was Venus was very low in the sky, and southeast.
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As Wipeout pointed out this was most likely Jupiter, which was in the southeast. As for the red lights, one can only guess. Without any additional information, that is all one can do. Lots of things produce lights in the sky with the main ones being aircraft (helicopters, planes,etc.).
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I saw a UFO last night...

thatguywhojuggles said:
The red lights were directly over me, and I was in a town, I was in south east Portland OR. The lights did not flash. They moved as if attatched to a giant wing.
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That the lights flew directly over you make makes it even more interesting. :D

Actually, from your drawing and mention of it seeming to be associated with an aircraft, I did wonder is it was a plane towing an advertizing banner:

http://www.skyhighadvertising.com/gallery.htm

But you said it was "following it/flying with it in some way" which doesn't sound like towing. I don't know if banners have red navigation lights anyway. Ah well.
 
Although it does not relate to the original posting on this thread, I was alerted to an unusual "UFO" event last night by my astronomy club's mailing list. Many astronomers saw the event including my wife, who was out doing some yardwork! Too bad I was inside at the time and was not aware of the spaceshot trajectory heading up the coast. You can read about it here. . It will be interesting how many UFO reports will be generated from this event!
 
This might be derailing the thread, I don't know, but I am sincerely curious as to what others think of something I witnessed one night:

I was in the front yard, at night, just looking up at the sky, and see a plane traveling South to North. No big deal, typical plane...

Suddenly, this small (comapred to the plane) round looking lighted object just zipped from the South up to the plane in about 2 seconds, quite clearly it was traveling much faster than the plane.

(It looked like it has two round lights that altenated; one on, the other off, etc. They were whiteish orange in color.)

It was also traveling veryclose to the plane, I remember thinking how scary that was. As it got up alongside the plane, it kind of swerved even close to the plane, as if it was going to hit it, then it "swerved" back out.

Then it zoomed backwards! It flew back, towards the south, away from the plane. Very odd.

A UFO, sure, in the sense I couldn't identify it. I'm sure it has a mundane explanation, I just don't know what it could have been.
 
I too have seen a UFO (That the next day appeared in the news).



It was a long time ago, and I will restate it as I remember it:


We were driving home from a Skiing trip in the moutains, east coast USA, and during the trip suddenly the entire road, the forest, everything became illuminated in a bright soft green light. The light that covered the area was akin to an "Indiglo" watch, however it covered everything that was visible. Three seconds later it was gone.


It was very, very dramatic. I suspect it was a meteor? Can they give off, or typically give off, this "Indiglo Green" light?
 
-42- said:
I too have seen a UFO (That the next day appeared in the news).



It was a long time ago, and I will restate it as I remember it:


We were driving home from a Skiing trip in the moutains, east coast USA, and during the trip suddenly the entire road, the forest, everything became illuminated in a bright soft green light. The light that covered the area was akin to an "Indiglo" watch, however it covered everything that was visible. Three seconds later it was gone.


It was very, very dramatic. I suspect it was a meteor? Can they give off, or typically give off, this "Indiglo Green" light?
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Meteors usually are blue-white. However, bright ones tend to have different colors. I have seen red, orange and green fireballs before. My guess is it was a green meteor that was magnitude -8 or brighter.
 
turtle said:
This might be derailing the thread, I don't know, but I am sincerely curious as to what others think of something I witnessed one night:

I was in the front yard, at night, just looking up at the sky, and see a plane traveling South to North. No big deal, typical plane...

Suddenly, this small (comapred to the plane) round looking lighted object just zipped from the South up to the plane in about 2 seconds, quite clearly it was traveling much faster than the plane.

(It looked like it has two round lights that altenated; one on, the other off, etc. They were whiteish orange in color.)

It was also traveling veryclose to the plane, I remember thinking how scary that was. As it got up alongside the plane, it kind of swerved even close to the plane, as if it was going to hit it, then it "swerved" back out.

Then it zoomed backwards! It flew back, towards the south, away from the plane. Very odd.

A UFO, sure, in the sense I couldn't identify it. I'm sure it has a mundane explanation, I just don't know what it could have been.
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An odd observation to say the least. One can not really determine what it might have been without more information. However, depth perception at great distances is not something that can be trusted. While the light may have appeared to pass close to the plane, it could have been much closer or more distant than the plane. They just happened to fall in the same line of sight. One can not tell without an observation from another vantage point some distance away.
 
Yep, there are some strange things in the sky. I have seen some UFO's too. There were 11 objects, in a rectilineal trajectory, without making any noise, dark black above and live red below. They crossed the sky one after another, at relatively close distance (like helicopters).

It will remain a nice mistery to know what they were :D
 
I’ve seen UFOs on several occasions. (Shocking yes?)

The last one was several years ago, about 1994 or so. 3 AM, I was in a very urban/ industrial area near a seaport. There were many tall structures, high tension power lines and smokestacks in the area. I was arriving at a company parking lot when I noticed a light moving up and down the nearby power company right-of way. I’d seen helicopters flying close to those power lines with antenna’s poking out of their fuselage in the day time. They search for line problems that way but it was strange to se one doing this in the wee hours of the morning.

When I parked I got a close look at the aircraft as it zoomed back an fourth. It was not a helicopter. It looked like a two engine civil aviation aircraft, a twin Beech Craft or something about the same size. It had blue flames coming out of the engines and it flew back and fourth, *below* the power lines, the smokestack and the other assorted structures.

What was it? I have no idea. I looked like an airplane but I remember it coming very close to me once, around two hundred feet up and turning so sharply that it’s wings were perpendicular to the ground. I’ve never seen maneuvers like that outside an air show and here, in the middle of the city, at three o’clock in the morning? It was astounding, not an aircraft or if it was the pilot was insane.

I asked the gate security guard is he’d seen anything unusual. He said no outside of the strange looking plane flying around for the past couple of hours.
 
That sounds very like a radio controlled model aircraft.
It would explain the sharp turns and the low altitude. Stupid place to fly one, under a power line. The visible exhaust is also common at night, as they tend to smoke , and the smoke reflects the exhaust flame. The sound is usually pretty recognisable though.

I have described elsewhere on this board how I and several others were totally fooled by a model glider into thinking we had seen a real sailplane make a forced landing in steep terrain.
 
Soapy Sam said:
That sounds very like a radio controlled model aircraft.
It would explain the sharp turns and the low altitude. Stupid place to fly one, under a power line. The visible exhaust is also common at night, as they tend to smoke , and the smoke reflects the exhaust flame. The sound is usually pretty recognisable though.

I have described elsewhere on this board how I and several others were totally fooled by a model glider into thinking we had seen a real sailplane make a forced landing in steep terrain.
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I agree, that was my thought, that it was some kind of remote controlled device. Whether or not it belonged there is another question, meaning, maybe it was some kind of official thing, or some idiot messing around.
 
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