Saturday, June 27th was gorgeous. Summer in the Pacific Northwest is like nowhere else; sunny days, relatively low humidity and a plethora of destinations for a motorcycle day trip. Come on...who doesn't like to suit up in some leather, put 1100cc of growling engine between your legs and ride? Alright, I'm only a passenger, Joe does all the hard work. Of driving the motorcycle!

In the seven years since I moved here from San Diego I had never visited the Olympic Peninsula, until 6/27/2009. Sure I stare at those mountains every day, and they'd taken on a kind of romantic sheen. I wanted to see the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I wanted to see craggy coastlines and majestic mountains. Dang it, I wanted to see Sasquatch! Well, we saw a lot of cool stuff, and I need my readers help in identifying something.

Not long after we married a friend of Joe's offered to sell us his Yamaha V-Star. We jumped at the chance. This is a nice cruising bike. Not as cushy as the Gold Wing or the Victory Vision, but a nice ride for a nice day out.

I don't really ride a motorcycle, I sit passively. This frees me to enjoy the sky, sun, the scenery and the wind in my face. It also gives me a lot of time to think, since the only soundtrack to our rides is the wind, occasional shouted comments and the thoughts scampering around in my head. No, I don't have the supercool, in-helmet speakers/earplugs/whatever that would allow me to listen to my IPod. Instead I think, I meditate, I plan what I'm going to write my next Hub about. I also scan for nice spots to stop and take pictures. We spot the places on the ride out and stop on the way back.

And you never know what you're going to spot at the side of the road. Yesterday, it was two deer, just standing in a wide spot next to the highway. They were clearly unfazed by the traffic whistling past them; I could see their jaws working, chewing away. Maybe that's their form of entertainment? "Hey, Ernie, let's go down to the highway and give the people a thrill." "Yeah, they take more pictures than the paparazzi!"

We left West Seattle around 9 a.m and head toward Edmonds. There we met up with our good friends, Rick and Lori and hopped on the ferry to Kingston. We started the day with the idea that we'd like to try and reach Neah Bay, but we were open to whatever the day was going to bring. We made our first stop in Port Gamble.

It was pretty and picturesque, and I'm sure the appealing-looking storeslining it's main street have a dazzling array of goods to offer. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to explore. I did get some nice shots of the town though.

We climbed back on our bikes and headed toward Port Angeles. It was somewhere between Port Gamble and Port Angeles that I noticed the contrail of a jet high up in the sky. It was unusual in that it seemed to spiral, not something I'd seen before in a jet contrail. Now, I'm not an expert in aircraft or jets. What I am good at is observation and I have quite a lot of time to observe the sky, clouds and contrails on our many motorcycle rides. I'd never seen this unusual, spiral formation, but that doesn't mean it's entirely new either, and I'm sure someone out there can tell me what causes it.

Is really kind of boring. It's hard to tell the details in the pictures posted. However, the first contrail caught my eye because of it's spiral shape. You can't see it in these pictures because by the time we found a wide spot to pull over that had a good view of the sky, it was pretty wind-tattered. It's the second contrail that got interesting.

Fair warning: I am an avid fan of Coast To Coast AM. The reason I want in-helmet speakers is so I can listen to George Noory, Ian Punnett, Geoge Knapp (and sometimes Art Bell!) chatting with their guests about aliens, UFO's, ghosts and conspiracy theories.

So the idea of chemtrails crosses my mind, as I watch the first contrail pass behind me. I'm still wondering what kind of jet or atmospheric disturbance would cause a contrail to twist like the double helix of our own DNA. Especially since the twisting portion is right under (over?) a bunch of long, wispy clouds.

As I'm pondering this I see a craft off in the distance, making a second contrail. Cool! I can already see it's doing that weird, twisty thing. But this thing is so far off, it's only a speck of light to me. I can see a metallic body moving across the sky, contrail flowing out behind it, but no distinguishing features. Awesome! I think, it's a UFO!

This is a very liberal utilization of the term. It's unidentified by Me. I would love for someone to be able to identify it.

Here's the coolest part: are you ready? It crossed the sky in about 20 seconds. I've never seen anything move so fast in the sky in my life. I don't mean it crossed my field of vision, I mean it went horizon to horizon in about 20 seconds. Is that weird? Because I sure as heck have never seen it before.

I spotted the aircraft making the second contrail while we were traveling through a stand of trees lining both sides of the highway. The terrain alternated along this stretch between dense stands and clear zones. At this time, we were in a tree-lined stretch and my field of vision was therefor restricted to a narrow band of the sky. The aircraft was the equivalent of 12 o'clock in front of me and about 30 or 40 degrees off being directly above me. It was smack in the middle of that narrow patch of blue and though I could not discern details about the aircraft I could clearly see blue sky ahead of a metallic craft with a white contrail flowing behind.

I thought, "That's weird, it's making the same kind of twisty contrail as that other one." I watched the aircraft for a few seconds, then turned to look behind me for the first contrail. When I turned to face front again I spotted the second contrail right away, and continued to follow it across the sky. We burst into a clear area as I was turning to face front from that thick stand of trees and I could clearly see that the second contrail continued to the far horizon. It covered this distance in less than 10 seconds. It only took me five seconds to turn my head back and spot the first contrail (Yes, I counted it out) and we came out into that clear zone immediately as I turned my head to face front again.

So, anyone know what this aircraft is?

Take a look at the first picture in each slideshow for Contrail #2 and Contrail #3. Same shot, essentially. They're taken 2 minutes apart. The first shot, shows the start of Contrail #3, while the start of it can be seen in the second picture. The sequence of pictures for the third contrail slideshow was taken over less than minute, and I followed Contrail #3 until it disappeared into the cloud cover and the trail ended.

This aircraft is considerably farther away than the one that made Contrail #2. You can see from the pictures how we are standing almost directly below Contrail #2, while Contrail #3 is only a little above the visible horizon.

We pulled over and I took these pictures between 10 and fifteen minutes after I first spotted Contrail #1.  That's why Contrail #1 is really wispy, Contrail #2 is starting get pulled apart by the wind and Contrail #3 happened while we were standing there.

The rest of the ride was pretty, and we had the added excitement of almost running out of gas. We left Port Angeles and followed Highway 112 along the coast. Fun, twisty road, but clouds and colder weather were moving in from the ocean along the Strait. When we got to the intersection of 112 and 113 we decided to head for home, turning south toward Sappho and the 101. We thought, since it's a town on a map, that we'd be able to gas up there and make it home, no problem.

Big problem came when we got to Sappho, and the gas station was boarded up. Even the pumps were gone. Uh Oh. There was nothing else in sight. So we turned east on 101 and crossed our fingers.

We made it past Crescent Lake. It was some stunning countryside and I'm sorry to say we didn't stop for photography, we were too busy trying to make our precious gas last. Luckily we found a station. Joe estimated he had 2/3 of a pint left in the tank. Too close for comfort.

From there it was on through Port Angeles, across the Hood Canal Bridge, hop a ferry and home we went. What a day!

The speed of these aircraft I described seemed uncanny to me. I know, this is horribly subjective, so I'm not making any extraordinary claims. I've tried to give you the timing and be as descriptive as possible, but keep in mind, I'm a layperson at this.

I'm asking for the experts out there to tell me, what is this aircraft?

I'm just genuinely curious what kind of craft moves that fast and twists it contrails. So I know what I'm looking at if I see them on my next motorcycle ride.