Finally, a serious one

These days, most UFO news articles are about trifling incidents that are usually explained within a day or two.  So when Leslie Kean writes a new UFO article, I take notice.

Leslie Kean is a respected journalist and a writer who has been involved in serious UFO investigation for many years now.  She is the author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record.  That's right.  It's all in the title.  No people sleeping in pyramids, no "space brother" prophets, only the serious stuff.

The article Ms. Kean wrote appeared in The Huffington Post.  It deals with video footage that has recently emerged from Chile.  Shot in 2010, the video is ostensibly of an air show of sorts put on by the Chilean Air Force.  Formations of F-5 and F-16 fighter jets fly overhead yet there is interestingly something more on the screen. 

A high-speed object appears to move in an elliptical pattern near or around the fighter jets.  This object moves so quickly that it is difficult to detect via the naked eye and the tape must be slowed down in order to see it.  My usual reaction to video footage such as this is fairly straightforward: bugs.  I don't know how many videos I've seen of people claiming to have caught "orbs" or "rods" on camera when all they've succeeded in filming were flying insects.  As these bugs travel rapidly past the lens, the camera represents them in strange, unusual ways to our eyes.  After watching the stuttered, slo-mo version of the vid, this is exactly what I thought was caught in Chile.

That is until I saw a magnified still frame.  When the UFO is isolated and magnified, it appears to be of an almost classic saucer shape.  As sunlight glints off of the top of it, we also get the idea that the object is probably metallic in nature.  This is completely different from most footage and photos of this nature, I'm talking about the kind where all you see is a shaky, fuzzy, blob of light.  Case in point, another UFO news article post on io9 featuring photos taken from an airliner, an airliner supposedly under "laser beam fire" from a UFO.  Far more likely it's the reflection of sunlight on the passenger's window.  In the Chilean case, you can see a physical object.  I even get the sense...without any evidence to back this up of course...that the UFO is under intelligent control.  Does this mean it is an alien spacecraft?  Not necessarily but it does render it a UFO simply by definition in that it is an object flying in the air and no one seems to know what the hell it is.

Time will tell.  The footage is going to need to go through a great deal more analysis and scrutiny.  Dr. Luis Barrera, an astronomer and skeptic from Metropolitan University of Sciences in Chile, has already taken a look at the footage according to the article.  Barrera has ruled out meteors, aerial fragments, birds, or airplanes.  "It had intentional movements. It moved east with 25 degrees inclination, which is the same angle of spacecraft when entering the atmosphere," he said.

Caution.  Like I said, we've got a long way to go before firmly declaring this as conclusive evidence of a non-human visitation, but wouldn't that be a gasser?  Still, the article does a service by pointing out how the United States is one of the only governments in the developed world that not only does not pursue serious UFO investigate but marginalizes the subject altogether.  France, Britain, Russia, and other nations take the matter seriously.  We don't.  Speaking to that point, Leslie Kean closes out with a fine quote by Dr. Michio Kaku:

"Scientists must stop giggling, and maybe we'll be able to learn more in the future," he says. "If another civilization is 1,000 years, a million years, ahead of us, then new laws of physics open up. And a million years, on the scale of the universe, is nothing."  


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