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The Story: I've been interested in UFOs as long as I can remember. Back when I was in 7th grade, during the winter of 1995-96, I got a few friends together, and we sat out in my backyard for the better part of the day with a video camera, looking for something unusual. While I was sitting in my tree fort with the camera, a friend standing on the other side of the yard began pointing and shouting. I ran out of the fort and across the yard with the camera rolling, and proceeded to capture footage of a small, silvery spherical object moving across the daytime sky. When it faded from view, I turned the camera off. Then something really unusual happened. A large black airplane, of a type that I have yet to positively identify, flew over my backyard toward the general area of sky where we had last seen the object. I turned the camera back on, and captured a few seconds of video showing this unusual aircraft. Until recently, I had only the VHS tape. When I built my new computer, I installed an ATI Radeon video capture card, which allowed me to take still shots from the tape. The following are those shots. They are completely unedited and are exactly as they were captured from the tape. |
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Analysis: The main criticism of this footage is that the thing basically looks like a balloon. When I witnessed it, it appeared as though it did not move like a balloon; that is, it seemed to swing back and forth in a manner inconsistent with something that would be carried only by the wind. Because of the camera movement on the tape, it was difficult to determine how the object moved simply by watching the footage. However, I was able to use Paint Shop Pro to make an interesting plot of the object's movement. My methodology was as follows. First, I established that no zooming took place during the clip containing the five stills. I did this by copying a central portion of the tree branches from one image and overlaying (temporarily) onto each of the other images. It fit perfectly on each.
I then drew a line from the tip of the uppermost tree branch - presumably a stationary point on this windless day - to the center of the object. I drew these lines on separate "layers" in Paint Shop, which allowed me to copy the lines without taking any background along. I pasted all the lines onto one image, using the tree branch tip as an anchor point. The endpoints of the lines then plot the S-shaped course of the object. Keep in mind that these stills are taken from about ten seconds of footage. It seems nearly inconceivable that the wind would move a balloon in such an obviously nonlinear fashion in such a short time. |
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