By Till Wöhler
Beijing, August 22, 2009 at 10:41pm
Beijing, August 22, 2009 at 10:41pm
It's supposed to be Jupiter, however this thing behaves quite strangely. [source]
Last Saturday, an unusually bright luminary lit up the night sky over Beijing. While the Ephemeris suggests it must be Jupiter, the object's strange behavior raises some questions. Here's an eyewitness's account.
Saturday evening after 10 pm, we accompanied a friend to our block's gate in the Dongcheng district. On our way, we noticed an extremely bright, yellowish-white twinkling object high in the southeastern sky. Moving at a slow pace, it by far over-radiated the few stars visible over Beijing. Up to today, its behavior gives us mysteries. According to the tables of the Ephemeris, it's supposed to be Jupiter, however, this thing behaved extremely odd.
After having seen our friend off, I fetched my small Canon G7 camera, put it on a tripod and took a few shots in just a minute's time. Zooming in with a factor of 24, the electronic image stabilizer helped to avoid blurred pictures. What was so astonishing to me was the fact that the object would change its color and size about every minute - despite unchanged camera settings and position.
Finally I took my digital Canon EOS, mounted an optical 300mm zoom lens and returned to the spot. This picture series covers short and long-term exposure, firstly to get a sharper outline and secondly to capture the trajectory of the object. To my astonishment, these photos, which were made with the self timer, no longer showed changing colors; furthermore, I recognized three small bright companions next to the big luminary. One to the right, two to the left.
These three formed a perfectly straight line with the large object; however, they could neither be seen with the naked eye nor through the mirror-reflex finder. Three coincidental passersby confirmed my findings. They examined both my photos and the object in the sky. Furthermore, the three smaller lights are, contrary to their large neighbor, not circular, but triangular in shape. Common to all four objects is a violet color fringe on the left and a green one on the right, which may have been caused by the lens.
Leaving aside the optical errors of a lens, a few questions remain unanswered: What are the three "companions" of the large object? Why did they emerge in the photo, while they were neither to be seen with the naked eye nor through the mirror-reflex finder? Why, as several long-term exposures show, did all ten of the lights that were visible around the large object, move at the same speed and in the same direction? i.e., ascending toward the south, without the camera being budged at all? Yet, the question of all questions remains: What is this large, radiating thing that was moving slowly across the skies while changing its color and size every minute…a star, a UFO, or a planet?
Last night I captured the big luminary on my camera again, through the open window of my balcony. In addition to the notorious change in color and size that we witnessed last Saturday, the large, bright object now appeared with the same three companions again, in the same straight line, yet in reverse order. No, I did not flip the old images! [view more pictures]
Other Recent UFO Sightings[source]
Jackson, New Jersey - 8/27/2009 - Witness was with his family waiting in line to ride one of the coasters when people all around them started looking up into the sky. What was described as a perfect circular object with a black edge was moving slowly in and out of the clouds. The object moved on a steady plane near the bottom edge of the heavy cloud cover. The black edge of the circle always remained visible even as the object continued to go in an out of the clouds. The object passed over the group estimated to number 100 people. Several of them yelled "UFO!". The object moved slowly against the wind for a half hour or more.San Diego, California - 8/24/2009 - Witness reported seeing a huge, completely black, rectangular object come from over the nearby hills. The object was approximately 200-300 feet off the ground and flew directly over the witness' house. He called his fiance out to verify what he was witnessing. As the object flew over the house, the witness noticed the object had rings on the bottom that appeared red in color. The witness further claimed that the object "looked like a spaceship, dull gray in color, similar to a warship". The object continued traveling over the house, then in a bright flash of light, disappeared from sight.
August 23, 2009 - According to the Shanghai news website, a UFO hovered over Chongquing for half an hour. Chongqing is the only municipality directly under the central government in western China. It is located on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, and is southwest China's biggest industrial and commercial center, communication hub, and inland port. At about 10:00 p.m. on the evening of August 23, a UFO (actual picture at right) appeared in the sky above Beibel Binjiang Road in Chongqing. The UFO was "v" shaped, and its color changed in the order of red, blue, green, yellow and white, in short intervals. Hundreds of people watched, but no one heard any sound produced by engines or propulsion equipment. During the half hour that the UFO appeared, a civil aircraft passed by. Witnesses compared the civil craft to the UFO and discovered that the UFO was obviously flying at a higher altitude. After hovering for about a half hour, the periphery of the UFO began to twinkle, then it disappeared into the night sky.
Great Britain declassifies top secret Irish UFO files
The British government recently declassified secret files from its Ministry of Defense, which have revealed a top-secret investigation into two sightings of UFO's in Ireland in 1993, and 1996. The UFO reports are part of a three-year project to release Britain's classified UFO files. The first sighting took place on March 31, 1993 when two objects were seen streaking across the Irish sky. Frantic callers swamped local law enforcement agencies with panicked calls as brightly-lit objects shot across the country. The Irish government is reported to have scrambled jets to monitor the objects but they obviously could not keep up with the UFO's that were flying at a speed of approximately 3,000 mph. The UFO file says they believe that people were witnessing the re-entry of a Russian launch vehicle after it had catapulted a Cosmos 2238 satellite into space.
In the second investigation, there were four separate reports of a UFO over County Down in January, 1996. However, the official investigation said there was no UFO and that the strange light came from lasers on top of a local hotel. The files are part of a huge archive from the "Flying Saucer Working Party" which was commissioned in 1952 by Prime-Minister Winston Churchill. Churchill acted after a UFO scare in America in July, 1952 saw the U.S. Air Force scramble jet inteceptors over Washington, D.C. The scare prompted Churchill to send a memo to the Air Ministry stating: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience". One of the key figures in the Flying Saucer Working Party was then Chief of Defense, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Mountbatten, who would be killed by the IRA in County Sligo in 1979, was one of a small group of influential military officials who believed UFO's really did come from outer space.
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