I have to be quick. They might be here at any minute. If I say too much I'll be one of the vanished, but I need to say something before it's too late.

Oh, OK, it's not that much of an emergency. It's actually something I've lived with for most of my life, grew up in a part of the country that's an Air Force testing range, and so far I haven't been killed by it, or "disappeared." Lots of things happen, and even a skeptic like me has to finally admit something is going on.

But I get very discouraged when I look at what evidence of the truly strange is available out there--not because most of it is phoneyed up, but because a lot of people are so gullible they believe it. I thought I'd spend a quiet day looking at UFO videos and try to pick out the good stuff, from the viewpoint of an experiencer (contactee, abductee, observer of strange military equipment, whatever). Let me tell you what, the view from my side of the mirror today is pretty disappointing. Maybe you just have to be on the spot to be impressed.

Take for example the fleets of UFO's over Mexico--I've not seen them myself, partly because a person like me is wise to stay out of airports these days, let alone go to Mexico on vacation. I'd be spending the rest of my life in some Mexican prison trying to convince the people in charge that I really don't have any money. Fortunately, there are a lot of videos of what's being seen down there. Take a look at this one--it's typical.

(Sigh).

I wish UFO's were more fun to watch. Usually all you see are silver globes. Sometimes they glow. Sometimes they move. Lots of times they just sit there.

Looking at this UFO fleet over Mexico, I think immediately of balloons. You can find images like this that were taken over Russia, Vietnam, China, Argentina, Arizona--heck, just about everyplace in the world. Usually they all move slowly, in formation, just like balloons floating on the wind. This film is a little more interesting, because the balloons move around each other, like the wind is a bit swirly that day. It makes me wonder, not about UFO's and why they are here, but about who is releasing hundreds of expensive weather balloons, all over the world? Maybe I'll write to the National Weather Service and try to find out.

Another possibility is that these are military tests, using balloons as radar disruptors. That's kind of spooky, because it's happening over major cities in many different countries. We don't all play with balloons, do we?

People talk about these things as though the UFO's form meaningful patterns and geometric shapes, but most of these films don't show that. They show the globes forming random patterns, moving in unison. Here's a video of the same sort of formation over Hanoi at night. 

Thinking back to anything I've seen that might be like this, I recall seeing a weather balloon when I was a kid. Two, actually. One was floating along at a pretty good height on a sunny afternoon and was obviously Balloooooon! (that's for anybody who remembers F Troop). Another was just clipping the tree tops when I was out hunting one day and for just a moment I thought I might be able to recover the instrument package and get a reward. Then it gained some altitude and I lost the gold mine to the wind. Neither of these things looked like UFO's. Actually, they looked like weather balloons and there was never any question about it.

On the other hand, late one night I was driving a woman friend of mine home from our date, way out in the country but on a major highway, and I told her she ought to keep an eye out for UFO's. She thought I was joking, but sometimes I get feelings about this, premonitions that something's about to happen. She laughed and scrunched down to look up through the passenger window and said, "Hey! What are those things?"

From time to time I could see them, too, as I was driving. About seven globes of silvery light, the same magnitude as the stars around them, playing about in swirling patterns too close and too fast to be aircraft. Some would stop, others would circle them, making quite a number of maneuvers and patterns that drifting balloons would not. My friend asked me to pull over so we could watch but I've had too much experience with that sort of thing and I replied that I thought it would be best if we just moving. The objects broke off in different directions soon after that, one of them flying a course that paralleled ours. We kept each other in sight for about fifteen miles until we hit the city lights and lost it.

It could have been visitors from the stars riding around in little silver orbs; but this was also that testing range area I mentioned, and those were the days before remotely controlled unmanned flying craft were known to be in our military toy locker.  Could have been either one. 

The closest thing I've found, in video, would be this footage of objects over San Francisco Bay. Something rings true about this one, but nothing about it says space ship. 

Some of the most entertaining footage of UFO's is the sort that makes you wonder how anyone could possibly fall for it.  I won't waste space with YouTube screens, but if you want to watch geese flying in migration flocks, photographed with terrible cameras, you can see that here.  A more ambitious effort to gain fame by filming a swarm of insects backlit by the sun, with intentionally blurred focus, is available here (jeez, in one brief shot you can even see the wings on the bug).  Other films aren't intended as frauds, but get misinterpreted, as is this incredible dramatic footage of a "UFO fleet" following a space shuttle just after a routine urine dump.   If you haven't guessed, it's actually a cloud of urine droplets.

There is some good stuff out there, video that's at least interesting to watch.  Towards the end of this montage of still photos and short film clips is film of an unknown aircraft photographed from a helicopter as it overflew a large city.  Probably not alien, it gives us a short look at what may be a Stealth style plane on maneuvers.  Back in the 90's I lived in an area smack in the middle of the Air Force's Stealth Bomber training range, and many of the UFO sightings of that day involved this very interesting military aircraft.  It's not something you see very often, even today.  More puzzling is this footage of a Quetzelcoatl object contorting in Mexican skies.  Could it be Balloooooon!?  Maybe.  Maybe something else.

Then there's the stuff down in Texas in the past year or so--some intriguing film shows up at the following link that is just a little bit hard to explain. 

From the Phoenix lights to Moscow footage showing silver globes flying overhead in crowded strands, we find video of lights that beg to outline shapes. They seldom do. Flares can float in formations that seem stable, and so can balloons. There isn't necessarily anything physical holding them in place.

That doesn't explain the row of colored globes, about a yard in diameter, that the picture beginning this article attempts to illustrate. My first thought when I saw them was that a plane was coming in low. But, they didn't move. I watched them until I had to put my eyes back on the road, and when I turned back they were gone. I could see the sky behind them while they were still in view, and there was no airplane holding them up. There's still a lot of explaining to do on that one.

Still pictures offer wonderful opportunities for fraud, being much easier to manipulate than video, and I could anger a lot of Billy Meier fans by saying what I think about his pictures, and the reasons why--but in the mix are some mysterious images that jolt the imagination at the very least, as in this collection of stills from the past century. Some ring true to me, many don't.

I was born at an interesting time, just when the UFO controversy was beginning. I'm sure they've always been around, and sometimes they come along in waves and people get all upset. Maybe a few people along the way, through the centuries, have figured it all out. The majority of us won't.

Just about the same time those UFO's showed up over our house, when I was a little kid, my Grandfather told a strange story. He was sitting on the porch of his house one afternoon when a silver saucer landed in the yard and three little people came out of it. They came up to him and lifted him out of his rocking chair and for some reason he just let them do it, it was like he couldn't move. He said they were pretty good to him, on the ship, and let him sit up front and look out the window, and he got to see the whole world from up there. He was really upset when my father didn't believe him.

I did. I'd already met the people he was talking about. Nobody believed me either.  Everybody I told my own story to explained to me that I'd only been dreaming.  My Grandfather and I had our own opinions.

A world without mystery is no fun.