Incredible, flying Christmas tree caught on video over Sacramento, CA

ABC affiliate News10 in Sacramento had their chopper in the air to cover high school football and ended up capturing something far more interesting. (Yes, I suppose if high school football is your basis for comparison, accidentally leaving on the lens cap would yield hair-raising footage.) If you click to watch the video to the right of the story, you'll see a dazzling object that looks like something from Clark Griswald's front yard holiday display whizzing through the air as the news chopper pursues.

Diamond-shaped objects over Austin, TX

The Austin Planetarium is looking into frequent, recent UFO sightings captured on video by local man Carl Lancaster. The Fox 7 news story is available on YouTube, made available by UFO Blog with the uncut UFO footage added to the end of the video.

In other UFO news, British paper The Sunday Mercury reports that a police helicopter had a rather harrowing encounter with a UFO over Birmingham.

Strange aurora over Saturn's north pole

The Cassini spacecraft - while intrepidly carrying out its mission of pointing a camera at Saturn and its moons from as many angles as possible, like a college-aged drinking enthusiast hosing himself down with a can of Axe body spray before hitting the bars - has found what the Astronomy Picture of the Day blog calls "aurora unlike any other seen previously in our Solar System."
It's fascinating how in this image the aurora in question appears to form a dome over the already mysterious hexagonal cloud formation at Saturn's increasingly mysterious north pole. Insane speculation being par for the course in Ufology, I can't help but imagine all this hubub being caused by some powerful, alien technology beneath those clouds.

Best Pics from UK UFO Archive

Britain's Telegraph.co.uk culled the archive of close encounters released by the Ministry of Defense for the most compelling illustrations and eyewitness testimonies.

Most Americans think we aren't alone in the universe

From Scripps News:

Most Americans say it is very likely or somewhat likely that humans are not alone in the universe and that intelligent life exists on other planets.

Only a third of adults, however, believe it's either very likely or somewhat likely that intelligent aliens from space have visited our planet, according to a survey of 1,003 adults conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University.

Backyard UFO

I had gotten bored with this blog and hadn't posted for a while. UFOs just didn't seem all that interesting to me anymore... until I started seeing objects like the one pictured above in my backyard.

The Spider-man is always hungry

The video for "Lullabye" by The Cure bears notable resemblance to common alien abduction scenarios. This brings up all sorts of questions. Just what do we know about Spider-man? Is he extraterrestrial in origin? Does he mean us harm?

PEI UFO

CBC News/Canada - The Ufology Research Centre in Winnipeg has been unable to identify this smoky spiral seen over Prince Edward Island on Boxing Day. (The story includes video.)

Other Headlines:

Gold Coast News/Australia - Experts baffled by orange UFO (No pictures. Damn.)

American Chronicle/America - Did you know that some people believe that the United Nations had a secret meeting regarding UFOs in February of this year?

Jim Sparks: Alleged abductee

Jim Sparks has a very detailed story of being abducted by aliens frequently throughout this adult life. I was listening to Mysterious Universe while cleaning my bathroom a couple of months ago, when I heard him relate some of his experiences and promote his book.

Sparks was also on Coast to Coast AM in 2006, and the C2C website has illustrations of his experience, such as the image above, wherein the greys attempt to extract semen from the prone abductee.

Will we find ETs within the lifetime of our civilization?

From the New York Times, an article about the progress that has been made - and hasn't been made - toward refining the variables in the Drake Equation. The Drake Equation was created in 1961 in an attempt to get some idea of what chance we have of contacting intelligent life from other worlds.

This articles links to an interactive Drake eqution at MSNBC's website. They don't actually write the Drake Equation out for you after you plug in the numbers, but I suppose it's all just multiplying fractions.

Venusian spacecraft hoax, 1952

The Museum of Hoaxes has a fun slideshow that takes readers through the history of photographic hoaxes. Above is an image of a Venusian spacecraft, which George Adamski purported to have taken in 1952, having made contact travellers from our sister planet:

Adamski worked as a soft-drinks salesman, and skeptics have noted a suggestive
similarity between the scoutcraft and the top of a particular brand of soft-drinks cooler.

Also featured in the slideshow: Ghosts, fairies, giant produce, and baby Hitler.

UFO over Portsmouth

Weblog Cosmic Paradigm notes this UFO spotted over Portsmouth in Britain. Interestingly, the Ministry of Defense quote in this article is the same as in The Sun, pertaining to a different set of UFO snapshots from London:

"The MoD examines reports solely to establish whether UK airspace may have been compromised by hostile or unauthorised military activity.

"Unless there is evidence of a potential threat, there is no attempt to identify the nature of each sighting reported."

I would venture to guess there is a document somewhere in the Ministry of Defense where you can cut and paste this quote to respond to journalists' emails.

Thanks to Mysterious Universe, both for calling attention to these sightings on their website and for consistently bringing the weird in their weekly podcast.

Aliens have telepathic powers; you should construct a special hat

According to stopabductions.com, one need fear no alien abduction when wearing a special, home-made helmet:

The very large brain of this alien gives it enormous telepathic/mind control powers. It comes to earth with no protection or weapons, relying solely on its telepathic ability to control and abduct humans. When humans wear a thought screen helmet the alien's telepathic ability is neutralized and it withdraws.

O'Hare 2006: A mass sighting awaits compelling video/photos

On November 7th, 2006, numerous witnesses claim to have seen a UFO over O'Hare airport in Chicago. According to eyewitness accounts, the dark grey object hovered over the airport before flying away, punching a hole in the low clouds. The above image comes from ufosightings.ca, though reliable pictures of the object itself prove elusive.

Dan Aykroyd, SNL alum and UFO enthusiast, claims to have come into possession of compelling video of the incident, but we'll have to wait until he releases his documentary to see the exclusive footage.

Know Your Neighborhood: The 11 Planets

Salon's Machinist blog notes an interesting mnemonic device for remembering the planets of our solar system, including the dwarf planets Ceres, Pluto, and Eris.

Cars and UFOs

Driving.ca, a Canadian website dedicated to all things automotive, has a relatively informative and even-handed article about drivers' UFO experiences. The piece quotes generously from Bufo Calvin, education director for the Organization for Paranormal Understanding and Support (OPUS).

Finding Distant Plantetery Systems

This image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day is an artist's illustration of what BLG-109 - a planetary system recently discovered using the technique of gravitational microlensing - might look like:

Recently a detailed analysis of microlensing system OGLE-2006-BLG-109 has related brightness variations to two planets that are similar to Jupiter and Saturn of our own Solar System. This discovery carries the tantalizing implication that interior planets, possibly including Earth-like planets, might also be common.

UFO briefs

icseftonandwestlancs/Wales - Some old Welsh villagers recall the sighting of a giant, cigar-shaped UFO in 1977. It seems that no one took any photographs. Was it from another dimension? Wild speculation is important in any investigation.

Wakefield Express/UK - "Fighting crime and watching the sky for extra terrestrial visitors is all in a day's work for one Wakefield detective."

UFO Digest/Canada - "Aliens have secrets, yet their UFOs are as common as automobiles on earth." I hope you've been vaccinated against crazy. I could only choke down one page of this three-page editorial. It seems to fall under the UFOs as benevolent gods/angels category.

The classic case of Billy Meier

Billy Meier has been communicating with aliens since he was a little, Swiss farm boy in 1942. He has produced thousands of photographs of his humanoid, extraterrestrial friends and their ships. These photos include the breathtaking example above, as well as the absolutely ludicrous image below.
Meier's American media representative, Michael Horn, appeared on Coast to Coast AM in January to speak with George Noory and someone (seemingly a true believer) has kindly posted this appearance on YouTube. The Coast to Coast AM website posted a number of photographs related to this case, including the chrome-plated IKEA birthday cake pictured above.

UFO museum to open in Russia

Via Russia InfoCentre, which appears to be a website to encourage Russian tourism.

The Russian city of Togliatty has all chances to turn into the country’s main
centre of paranormal tourism. In the nearest future it is planned to open an UFO
museum here and to construct special tourist settlements where travellers could
spend nights awaiting for aliens.

It is unfortunate that the article completely fails to give specific context for the UFO photo that accompanies the text.

Indiana Jones, Area 51, Roswell, and Weedmaster P

Today's Overcompensating comic strip is about all that good ol' Roswell hullabaloo.

Grantham, UK sighting has lifelike illustration

From the Grantham Journal:

A UFO spotter is certain alien crafts are in the skies above Grantham- and fears they have sinister plans.

Allan Spick, 69, of Great Gonerby, has seen five UFO's in the past five years from the window of his home in Belvoir Gardens.

The most recent was in the early hours of Saturday, February 8.

Guy Named "Clowd Nyne" Spots Florida UFO

Raw video from WFTV/Orlando - A camera crew spotted this UFO over Tampa on January 20th. The original WFTV story mentioned that the "fireballs" seemed to defy the laws of physics. The network now notes on their website that this has been identified as part of an air show during Tampa's annual Gasparilla Pirate Festival. I guess no one consulted a physicist (or a scientist of any sort, or a calendar) before the original story was reported.

Looking for Aliens in the Microscopic World

In a noble attempt to catch up on the backlog of Scientific American magazines building up on my house, I came across an article from the December issue about searching for "alien" life here on Earth. The SciAm website has a slideshow with some beautiful and weird artist's conceptions of how these unusual microbes might look.
The idea is that if life is likely to come into existence given certain conditions, then it's possible it could have happened more than once on Earth. SciAm explores how there could be life that functions in biochemically different ways from our own:

Researchers have hypothesized that in alien organisms arsenic could successfully fill the biochemical role that phosphorus plays for known life-forms. Arsenic is poisonous to us because it mimics phosphorus so well; similarly, phosphorus would be poisonous to an arsenic-based organism.

Also interesting to consider is that if scientists were to discover a form of life on Earth that emerged independently from the rest of life as we know it, this would be a good indication in favor of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, as it would seem to be almost inevitable under certain circumstances.

Stephensville UFOs Story Continues

KDFW/Dallas-Fort Worth continues coverage of the Stephensville UFO sightings. The number of witnesses coming forward, as well as the credibility of some of the individuals involved, have really kept this story going. Above is a still image of one of the purported UFOs. The link goes to a video that provides a pretty good summary of the situation so far in about five minutes.

I hope none of the witnesses takes the "dubious" tag on this post the wrong way. In UFO Clearinghouse parlance, dubious simply refers to the likelihood of the involvement of alien intelligence, not whether or not someone is honestly describing something mysterious they saw in the sky.

I think one of the most interesting things in this clip is when a representative of MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) says that they've proven that there are UFOs and now they just need to find out what they are. This sounds a bit spooky at first until you think about the fact that what he's saying they've proven is that there are things in the sky that can't be identified. This doesn't sound all that weird, considering the cool puzzling stuff going on in the universe all the time. Though I think it still comes across that he really hopes it's aliens.

UFO lands, sits on top of a hill all day, no pictures

Mysterious Universe links to this story from Inexplicata, describing an encounter in which a UFO landed in Mexico and then remained where it was for 30 hours while countless witnesses looked on. Despite the amount of time involved, this is the only picture accompanying this story:
Perhaps an inauspicious start for this blog.