Anyone here ever see something similar?
Yeah, we are both in the same place. I want to be a rational as possible but I also want to believe we are not alone in the universe. This is as human of a feeling as I know, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_...
Is anyone visiting? That's more far-fetched given the distances and such.
Any mundane explanation like that is so much more likely than it being alien or super secret technology.
There are things that people notice, empirical observations if you want to call them like this, that have a certain social stigma associated with them. And I feel that, precisely _because_ of this stigma, people rush to justifications and conclusions that fit our normal model. But how can we find out what they actually are if we try to wiggle things within our model, how can we tell if our model is somehow incomplete?
I will say that I am unconvinced by the explanations people have for these events. They feel forced, contorted and somehow touched by the spirit of the environment that gave birth to the explanations.
Still gives me chills remembering watching it.
I would give this more time but I need to go to bed, I've spent more time in this thread than I thought I would.
It was late at night and we were in the back of a pickup getting some shuteye, heading east on the 8 outside of San Diego - if I had to make a guess we were somewhere between SD and El Centro; I can't narrow it down more.
So we're going down the freeway, and above the mountains to the south we see this bright "dot" - yellowish. It sits there, hovering above the mountains. Then it moves slowly to the west, staying above the mountain line - and instantly stops. Stays still for a bit, then at a steep angle (or what appeared to be) it instantly accelerated (like in the blink of the eye) "up" and was gone.
My best guess after the fact? Somebody aiming or messing around with an artificial star (sodium laser):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_guide_star
At least - that's what I tell myself, because I have no other rational idea as to what could move like that...
They moved around in a non-linear fashion at will, they were intelligently operated. One of them disappeared in a flash...
Strange thing was during encounter #2, they appeared in the spot in the sky 2 nights in a row.
It's easy to dismiss these encounters as nothing and it's also easy to just jump to wild conclusions. I asked here to see if others have seen something like this and I got my answer, I'm not the only one. It's good that both of our encounters were in California too, where some of these leaked videos are from as well.
Turns out like crap. I doubt even the best camera phone could catch meaningful video of an object at 20k ft
We were driving through very rural Illinois at about 10 pm. I was just staring out of the window up at the sky.
Suddenly, I noticed a rather bright orb (not perfectly circular or anything, I just don't know how else to describe it) hovering in the air. I would guess maybe a quarter mile laterally, and only a couple hundred of feet up. I didn't think much of it at first; I thought it was a plane to be honest. But then it faded out -- more like shimmered out. When it shimmered back in, there were now several of them, 3 or so. They moved in very quick, defined spurts -- thirty feet left then stop, ten feet up then stop. Then these faded out, and faded back in again, but now there were 6-8 of them. More weirdly precise movements, moving separately but staying close as a group. Then they all went absolutely tearing off, directly up, in unison. Lost sight of them almost immediately.
I can't emphasize enough how close they seemed. These weren't far-off objects I had to squint to see. For those who have driven through rural farmland in USA, think about your typical interstate with a planted field off to your left. A big planted field, but still only field sized, with a line of trees marking the property boundary on the far edge. That's what these were by, and they were well within the boundaries of the field.
I was in the car with my parents, both of whom saw them. (I was getting ready to enter college, so I was probably 18.) They seemed very freaked out and refused to discuss it; I was just captivated and curious. To this day they won't discuss it and sometimes even pretend they don't know what I"m talking about.
Again, I'm not at all saying they were ETs, I firmly believe the properties of the Universe make it an infinitesimally small chance that a crossing-of-the-paths will ever occur for two intelligences, if multiple inhabited planets even exist. But I just don't know what these were. They were very close, very bright, very concrete (if that makes sense at all), and their movements were unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Very unnatural-seeming motions.
I've never seen anything like it since, either. It's not like I've suddenly started seeing lights everywhere I look.
I’d make a correction though. It was not as fast as a super fast bird but more akin to a lightning fast game of laser tag or air hokey. The weirdest thing is that for some reason it immediately impressed on me that this was technology.
Far from improving the situation positing other dimensions which we have no proof exist, and beings that we have no proof even can exist seems to make the theory much weaker not stronger.
The reality I see is several hundred thousand people can believe virtually anything, and all agree with each other. Look at the anti-vax movement, which today compared itself with the civil rights movement. Also, flat-earth and creation science come to mind. I can’t say if any of these are right or wrong about their respective claims, but their tactics and communications styles are largely similar. The group’s metaphorical center of gravity becomes so dense it manufactures its own credibility from within.
If you don't know what they were then you can't rule out these other things.
They moved around in a non-linear fashion at will, they were intelligently operated. One of them disappeared in a flash...
One of the people with me was from Columbia University and he is as 'rational' as they come, even he was baffled...
PS: One of the strangest things I saw in the nights sky tuned out to be one of these: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5J52MLXXUy4 My perspective of how large and fast it was ended up being completely wrong.
My husband was driving on a remote part of i-10 in Mississippi very late at night, and were the only ones on the road for a long time and it was pitch black - no overhead lights at all, no cars in either direction. We were traveling in the right lane when we both saw a car's tail lights ahead of us, starting to merge into our lane (it appeared to be driving forward, but slower than we were). I'm kinda a side seat driver subconsciously, so I did a little lean away from it, and my husband put his blinker on and got left to avoid an accident. We figured it had been stopped on the side for some reason, and was just merging back in. But as we drove past it, we realized we couldn't see the rest of the car. There was no reflection of our head lights against the body, no headlights or any light at all in our rear view mirror. There was no sound as we passed it. It just wasn't there. We even slowed down in the left lane for a bit, thinking it could catch up, but we didn't see any other cars until we exited to Biloxi. And besides, there was no way anyone could drive on that road with no headlights on a night like that.
I made note of the mile marker from where it happened (near Vancleave fwiw) and looked it up on google maps later. There wasn't a good margin or side road or something that would have made sense for someone to stop at.
We've driven across the country 4 times now, but nothing like that had happened before or since. I don't know whether to call it a ghost car, a multi-verse artifact, a shared delusion or what. But whatever it was, it was hard to reckon with.
I wonder if anyone else has seen that in the area as well. I'm not sure how one would find out. Besides looking it up on Google Maps, did you check Street View too?
I was thinking it might have been the red reflectors some people around my neighborhood have to mark the edges of their driveway entrance. They're on a scrawny metal pole and about taillight-height, and could be mistaken for a car's rear end from a distance, I guess, if there were a pair of them, and they caught the headlights just right. If an area is rural, no streetlights, I could definitely see someone having those.
Again, thanks for sharing.
The first one was just me alone backpacking. I doubted it until I realized this was not an uncommon thing to see based on other accounts I soon learned about.
All the people there with me ruled out all the logical possibilities too, most of them were skeptics (including myself) before we saw them. We still joke about the ordeal when we see each other.
Not necessarily - they can be turned off, non-functional, or drowned out by a brighter light like the landing lights from a distance.
> One of them disappeared in a flash...
Or someone flipped the landing lights switch.
I saw a C-17 at night while staying near Fort Drum that I was completely baffled by until it got close enough to properly make out. Had it stayed away, I'd have had one of those "inexplicable" encounters people talk about too.
Does 'formation flying' involve craft flying around in random non-linear fashion?
There was a bunch of us and we discussed it for awhile, aircraft is the first thing we jumped to...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_flying
That you're asking that question really makes it hard to credit the claim that you successfully ruled out "all the logical possibilities".
edit: You edited in some additional, so:
> Does 'formation flying' involve craft flying around in random non-linear fashion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight
A distantly seen dogfight at night would involve afterburners (bright lights! and they'd wink on/off during maneuvering, when they're turned on/off, or when the plane turns to face towards you instead of away from you) and rapid random non-linear movements as described.
How close is "next to"? Aircraft tend to have multiple lights, many symmetrically positioned. And when it's closer than you think and maneuvering, it may look as if the lights are moving non-linearly. Disappearance of a light can be explained too - the plane maneuvered in a way that its wing or fuselage blocked your view of the light.
Strange thing was during encounter #2, they appeared in the spot in the sky 2 nights in a row.
We know how to build two kinds of rockets: high thrust rockets with low specific impulse (Merlin, Raptor, SSME, F-1, etc.) and low thrust rockets with high specific impulse (ion thrusters). Excluding crazy stuff like thermonuclear pulse propulsion, we do not know how to build a rocket that is both high specific impulse and high thrust.
There is no physical reason to believe that such a thing is impossible though. We just don't (at least in the declassified world?) know how to build one.
A rocket that's both high thrust and high specific impulse would have a thrust whose particles are traveling at probably near relativistic speeds. Think of it as using a high efficiency high throughput particle accelerator as a rocket.
The performance of such a thing would be simply awesome, especially in terms of "delta-V budget" as per the rocket equation. In physics terms it's a plain old reaction engine but to someone ignorant of the tech it would look almost like anti-gravity or some other kind of magic.
Now here's where it gets kind of neat. What would such a thing look like visually if it were operating in the atmosphere?
Those crazy high energy exhaust particles would immediately collide with the atmosphere and emit light. The light would be a mix of the emission spectra of whatever the exhaust is made of and atmospheric gases. If the exhaust contained heavier stuff like metal ions the colors could be vivid and bright. Brightness and possibly color could change based on thrust and thrust vectoring.
It would look like a flying orb or a neon light show.
It would also be dangerous if you were anywhere close to it since it would kick off quite a lot of heat and probably X-rays or worse. If it were truly near-relativistic it would probably ignite small amounts of nuclear fusion in the atmosphere and emit neutrons and gamma rays too. I imagine that might give it a little more power too, like an afterburner from hell. I imagine there would be RF emissions as well.
The craft itself would be hot as hell too since the power requirements would be at least in the hundreds of megawatts. Even if the power source and thrusters had really high efficiency, the second law of thermodynamics would require the craft to dump at least tens of megawatts of heat overboard somehow. It would light up brightly in the infrared and be really obvious to FLIR.
Small craft using a thruster like that might look like flying orbs or multicolored light shows. A much larger more powerful one could probably attain velocities that would allow interstellar travel in "reasonable" time frames... for something with a really long life span or non-biological that is.
Again just speculation, but AFAIK does not violate any known physics and would match quite a lot of UFO reports.
Nobody who wasn't off their face on drugs or mentally ill probably, no.
"they were not weather balloons, satellites, planes, planets, stars, or meteors."
Other than little aliens in magic flying machines what do you think they could have been?