Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

December 18, 2022 - In case you haven’t heard, back in August of 2020 a new task force was formed within the US Office of Naval Intelligence to study UFOs except the term UFO has a connotation of aliens to most people, so they came up with a new name, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). You might wonder why I am talking about such things when this is not a conspiracy theory website.

Last night I was talking on the phone and happened to be looking out the window, when I saw an airplane. But then I realized that airplane condensation trails don’t glow. They also don’t stay exactly the same length and the wind usually blows them around. So my second thought was it must be space junk burning up in the atmosphere. But it wasn’t burning up! This was something else. So I quickly got off the phone. Sorry Nancy for all but hanging up on you.

I ran to get a second set of eyes on this thing and, I hoped, a better opinion.

I had noticed the object approaching from the west. It was now passing the house to the north and would soon pass over the Continental Divide to the east. We grabbed our cameras and headed out the front door. We were just in time to get one quick photo.

It looks like a giant glowing space caterpillar. And it is just as out of focus as every other creepy UFO shot. Let me explain the shot. The object is moving from left to right. That hook looking thing on the left is the back of the object. So what is it? It didn’t make any noise that I could hear. And it was moving too slow to be one of Kim Jong-un’s rockets. Not that he can shoot them this far. Any military aircraft would need to move a lot faster than this thing to avoid being shot down. It could be a dirigible (blimp). So I looked it up, of course.

There are about 25 known dirigibles in the USA. Goodyear, being the most well known has three based in Ohio, California, and Florida. So probably not one of those. There is an Aeronautical Adventure Airship blimp based in Eagle, Idaho. So I looked that up. That airship looks like a hot air balloon made in the shape of blimp. I doesn’t look sturdy enough to be flying this far from home or at night. There weren’t any others close by. So I tried the FAA’s website. Not much of interest there.

So I tried a different approach, what might be happening in the area that would have an odd airplane. There were no air shows in the area. The only event I could find was a concert in town. so not that. I found a sighting of Starlink satellites. That looked like this.

That is just a string of dots. Following the Starlink lead. I found this!

That looks like a pretty good match. Here is a video that looks very close to what we saw. I am going to say it is a row of Starlink satellites. If you have any other ideas, please leave a comment.

If it is satellites then sightings like this will become more common. Now if you see one you will have some idea what it might be.