Posts Tagged UFO
Amazing Easily-Identifyable-Flying-Objects Of 2009
2010 is almost upon us, and it’s around about this time of the year that people start doing niche retrospectives of the year. Top 10 twitterers of 2009. 15 of the best political balls-ups of the year. 2009 in animal dentistry: a retrospective. That kind of thing. Well, I never claimed to be particularly original, just as The Sun hasn’t ever claimed to be conduct truthful reporting of the story. With this in mind, and the end of the year fast approaching, I give you your-super-soaraway-whopping-Sun’s ‘Amazing UFO pics of 2009‘.
As anyone who keeps their eyes to the skies – or, more likely, to the news and the skeptical blogosphere – might imagine, this bumper UFO-tastic article follows on not only from the recent strange spirals over Norway (which turned out to be a stray Russian missile, rather than a stray alien emissary) but also from the news that the Ministry of Defense has latterly closed the UFO-hotline. I know recent Righteous Indignation guest Nick Pope was particularly interested in that latter story, which you can hear over on the RI Podcast site. Feel free to have a listen, I’ll wait if you like.
Actually, that’s a lie – I won’t wait at all: if the MoD have decreed alien sightings too unimportant to report to them, I best crack on through the story before the MoD’s lack of interest inevitably trickles down to your alien-believer on the street, and the whole UFO story goes cold. That’s how it works, right? Read the rest of this entry »
Episode #011
Posted by Mike in 10:23, Podcast, Skeptics with a K on December 17th, 2009
Christmas Special! The guys take a skeptical look at the traditional nativity story. Plus interdimensional portals over Norway, two full moons in the sky in January and your crazy homeopathic remedies.
Breaking News: Bulgaliens Have Landed
Posted by Marsh in Crop Circles, Skepticism, UFOs on December 8th, 2009
Stop the press: aliens have finally gotten in contact with Earth. Just kidding – don’t really stop the press. Actually, there isn’t even a press to stop, what with this being online and all. Unless you count WordPress. Hell, why not – Stop the WordPress: aliens have finally gotten in contact with Earth. What’s more, they’re no mucking around – they turned down the advances of Carl Sagan’s beloved SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and instead have gone straight to the top guys, the big cheeses: the Bulgarian Space Research Institute.
Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (to give it it’s full title), confirmed research into the other-worldly communication was currently underway, and that the aliens were in the process of answering 30 questions beamed out into space by scientists. And their chosen method of communication? Did they beam their answers directly into Filipov’s brain? Did they use their advanced technology to create a universal translator and speak Bulgarian to the lucky scientists?
Did they hell. They left a series of 150 crop circles, around the world. Including the dragonfly circle left in Yatesbury, Wiltshire, earlier this year. It’s never easy, is it? Poor Bulgarian scientists. But Filipov holds out hope that he won’t always have to be jetting around the world looking at pretty patterns in the grass (patterns that could be made, say, by someone like… say… anyone who wanted to). Apparently he holds out hope that in the future people will be able to establish contact with the extraterrestrials through the power of thought. That thought presumably being ‘Oooh, look at that pretty crop circle pattern’. Read the rest of this entry »
Putting The ‘P’ In Space
We’ve seen a lot of explanations for UFO sightings in the past – most notably Lighthouses, Surveillance balloons, Chinese lanterns, clouds, meteors, Mars, stars, Venus, the moon, mistaken identities, hallucinations, exaggerations, lies, aircrafts and aliens. Wait, no, that last one shouldn’t be on that list. Not aliens. But the latest explanation to emerge has to top them all – discarded urine. Well, by discarded I mean urine ejected from a shuttle, specifically, not as in ‘left lying around’. In the latter sense a lot of urine gets discarded, granted, but only the former sense leads to UFO sightings.
I’m talking specifically about a bright sparkling glow seen in the night sky over Wisconsin, USA, which left skygazers searching for an explanation. Was it a comet? Could it have been aliens? Well, no, as it turns out – it was in fact the frozen waster water from the shuttle Discovery, which was jettisoned by pilot Kevin Ford in preparation for a landing attempt the following day. Rumours that he had previously attempted the jettison but had been unable to complete the task while his fellow-astronauts were watching are not true, most notably because I just made them up. Because I’m childish sometimes. Read the rest of this entry »
Unidentified Substances + Wishful Thinking = UFOs
Posted by Colin H in Conspiracy Theories, Media, UFOs on August 29th, 2009
Earlier this month more UFO files were released as part of a three year ongoing project between the Ministry of Defence and The National Archives. The files can be viewed here. They range from the more usual “I saw some lights in the sky and don’t know what they were” type of report, to the more extravagant “Flivob the Venutian wanted my sperm to repopulate his planet” kind of story. Ok, I obviously made that last one up, but those kinds of stories do crop up. I believe whiskey is normally involved. And a prior tendency to spout nonsense.
The files range from the years 1981 to 1996, and we get some cool stuff in there. We get waves of sightings recorded across Belgium in 1989 – 1990, which led to F-16 jets being scrambled by the Belgian Air Force. The F-16s obtained lock-ons with their radars but were unable to explain the phenomena. We also get a 1994 report by an air crew flying from Moscow to Tokyo, which describes a huge object entering the Earth’s atmosphere over the Arctic, creating a shockwave supposedly 200 miles long. The crew reports that the UFO came in over the North Pole at an estimated speed of 10-15,000mph. There are numerous records in the files of reports by pilots and air crews, including near-misses between UFOs and airliners. Read the rest of this entry »
UFOs Spotted Over Lake District. Really. UFOs. No Fooling. OK, Maybe SOME Fooling…
Posted by Marsh in Media, Merseyside, UFOs on June 16th, 2009
So the Lake District is the latest area of England to be visited by UFOs. Following on from the ones spotted in Shropshire, Cambridgeshire, London and… erm, well… Merseyside. Yes, Merseyside. That sound you can hear is us, dropping the ball on that one. Aliens in our back gardens, and there we were out ‘mobbing’ local ‘psychics’. Boy were our faces red.
But as it happens, the Merseyside UFOs weren’t aliens, after all. I’ll let you have a moment to stop reeling from that shock revelation. Done? Good. They were countermeasure flares deployed in a navy training routine. Even the woo-tastic Telegraph is happy to go with this explanation, so it must really hold water – give those guys half an inch of wiggle room and it seems they’re the first ones to don their tin-foil hats and hum the theme tune to the X-Files. And the BBC are not much better – ‘Do-Dee-Derr-Derrr…Do-Dee-Do-Derr-Derr-Derr…‘ As it happens, I was half-way through an ‘it’s probably something straightforward’ type post when it emerged that it was, in fact, something straightforward. ’Oh,’ thought I, ‘that’s that then. No need to write on UFOs, it’ll be ages before another one of those comes up.’ But UFOs, like buses and clichés, rarely come along one at a time… Read the rest of this entry »
