I’ve seen a UFO! Weh-hey! What are the chances of that?
Let me add some of the
detail to the horde of UFO-lore. I
was lying on a beach at the very southern tip of Gran Canaria off the coast of
Africa staring at the sky. Staring
at those things that float around in the aqueous humour of your eye, to be
honest, letting my focus drift between them and the deep azure of the heavens
when I saw it.
There wasn’t a lot to
‘it’. A dot at the edge of
space. Bright on the side catching
the sun; the opposite dark with shadow.
It didn’t pulse, shimmer, shiver or make any movement apart from arcing
across from the point I saw it until I lost it over towards the northern
horizon. Arrow straight, it must
have taken ten, twelve, fifteen seconds to traverse those ninety or so
degrees. Way faster than a plane
and without any contrail, I concluded that I’d seen a satellite.
It also fitted with
those satellite trails you sometimes see overlaid on world maps, arcing
sinusoidally over the Earth north to south, each pass seeming to move on a few
hundred miles whereas its really the Earth that turns beneath.
But then a gull flew
over at great height, but not so great that I couldn’t pick out detail, grey
and white, the sun catching one side of it, gliding on the Jetstream. It too arced at velocity in a perfect
line - the same line too - until out of sight in exactly the same
direction. But if what I’d seen
had been a gull then it had been practically stratospheric.
So, satellite or
seagull? And you thought that I
was going to talk about flying discs and little green men…
And this is my point:
it’s unidentified; its identity is yet to be established. And if a UFO is an ‘unidentified flying
object’ then what I saw was, QED, a UFO.
In fact, anything that flies that we’re not sure about is, pedantically,
a UFO. UFOs are therefore quite
prosaic, everyday entities.
What we really mean, of
course, is ‘unidentifiable flying object’ which is much rarer. I’d suggest rare to the point of non-existent. Satellite or seagull? Yes, one or the other…
