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© Copyright 1998, Jim Loy
Imagine that you are driving your car, at night. And you see, out of the corner of your left eye, a bright, orangish light, up in the sky. You turn your head to look at it. The bright light hovers for a second, and then, it zooms ahead of your car, and disappears in the distance. Wow! What was that? That was my UFO.
That UFO probably would have remained unidentified, except that it happened again, shortly afterwards. And, I was able to see how it had happened. Here's how it happened the second time. I again saw a bright, orangish light, off to my left. I looked at it, and saw that it was the reflection of an electric light off to my right. It was one of those streetlight kind of lights, that stand over some houses. On my left, it appeared to be up in the air, because my side windows are tilted, and not vertical. The light on my left would have slowly moved backwards, except that the road turned. As I turned my car to the right, the light on my left moved forward, not as fast as the former UFO. And it disappeared when it encountered the door frame.
This phenomenon was startling, and amazing, until I could figure it out.
As I reported in my story, My Pimple, I have witnessed a few other UFOs which I later identified:
With this last one, the passenger jet, I may have actually heard the jet engine noise all along. But, I may not have associated the sound with the sight. And it was a fairly impressive UFO.
Addendum #1:
A reader emailed me, to comment that my UFO, at the top of this article, was fairly lame. No. While it couldn't compete with a flying saucer landing on the freeway, or skinny space dudes abducting me, it was very impressive. Bright lights, in the sky, do not normally zoom around like that one. It lost most of its luster, by being identified. Too bad.
Now, had I not identified it, would I now be a believer in UFOs (as outer space visitors)? I don't know. I'm sure that I would tend to believe. It would seem that whether a person is convinced, by such a sight, has little to do with whether UFOs come from outer space or not. Misidentification plays a big part, and confuses the issue.
Also, passenger planes (and other planes and helicopters?) have a very bright landing light, to illuminate the ground. And they may shine this light well before reaching the airport.
My dictionary informs me that UFO is pronounced yoo-eff-oe, and sometimes YOO-foe.
Addendum #2:
I received email criticizing the above as poor science: "You can summarily dismiss their observations [the many witnesses] out of hand without examining them but is that scientific." My reply:
You're right, there may (or may not) be many true UFO sightings. But I hope you picked up on what I was trying to say: it is nearly impossible to separate the legitimate individual sightings from the misidentifications (and there are a lot of misidentifications).
Also, people seem to have a need to believe even the most obvious misidentifications and hoaxes (most crop circles, in my opinion). And attributing lights in the sky to an advanced civilization capable of interstellar travel is a leap in logic that looks very shaky to me.
Of course I did not say that all UFO sightings were false, and I don't think I even implied that, as I was just reporting my own experiences.
I have a small suspicion that all UFO sightings are false (are natural events of some kind). But I wouldn't be very surprised if that suspicion is wrong.