Is it me or does this look vaguely familiar?

I’ll leave it to the photography experts here at DU. I’ll just label it “swamp gas”.




  1. hhopper says:

    Cripes! The aliens are parachuting in all over the place! Run for your lives!

  2. Faxon says:

    Can’t we leave this crap to the AM Coast to Coast show?

  3. sargasso says:

    Someone sneezed on the lens. It’s a drop of water.

  4. Buzz says:

    Idiot! That “Hovering Object” is a CLASSIC LENS REFLECTION.

    Lordy. How many times in 2010 will that exact same internal distorted reflection show up as a THING?

    Let’s see: Population of Earth: c. 7 Billion. Divide by two (women don’t harbor conspiratorial tendencies as much as men), so the answer is c. 3.5 Billion.

    Idiots.

  5. mentor972 says:

    Looks like a lens flare to me.

  6. hhopper says:

    Why don’t some of you photographers out there see if you can recreate this lens-flare phenomenon?

  7. M0les says:

    Yep… STILL looks like a lens flare to me.

  8. Buzz says:

    #6, just go get me some focusing fluid!

    Here’s another one equally “mysterious.”

    Grab your pillow and flash camera. Set the camera to shoot a flash picture but dial in a two-stop exposure reduction.

    Turn out the lights and pound the pillow exactly 17 times as you stand in the corner of the room.

    Immediately shoot a flash picture.

    Those blobs are space aliens, responding to the pillow drum-beat.

  9. Bob says:

    I for one welcome our new giant flying jellyfish masters.

  10. McCullough says:

    #8. More likely it was ‘shopped from the other photo.

  11. Jägermeister says:

    A NASA weather balloon?

  12. bud says:

    Well at least this photo verifies the lensflare thing for the aurora shot, you could probably map those ethanol angel sea monkey lens flares to the lights on the plant itself with not much difficulty

  13. amodedoma says:

    Easy to confirm lens flare. Draw line through ‘axis’ and follow it down. It should be pointing directly to one of those bright (probrably the brightest) light sources in the foreground.

  14. f. garza says:

    hmmm. looks a lot like a lens flare. Watch Star Trek and you’ll see lens flare galore.

  15. JFStan says:

    What’s the big deal? It’s obviously the Justice League’s satellite space station, the Watchtower.

  16. Awake says:

    Which way is the wind blowing in that first photo?

  17. SG says:

    Weren’t these the little things flying around in the 3D Avatar movie????

  18. LDA says:

    Yeah, an ethanol plant, that’s a pretty good place for smoke.

    I saw somewhere that said it was in the aurora borealis. I guess they can’t even get that right.

  19. Serious says:

    I assume that It is not a lens flare because multiple individuals in multiple (different) locations took pictures of the same object in the sky at around the same time:

    Person 1
    Person 2

    Headline: The parachute appears in the same spot in the sky on all the pictures.

    I reckon it is a meteor that trailed in – in the upper atmosphere – and when heated up due to friction, it blew up. Just a small meteor,nothing like Leonid, which managed to keep intact for a much longer period. Going from space towards our atmosphere: trailing tail.. explosion, debris and with northern lights it is highlighted. Nonetheless, I shall try and re-create the same effect if it is just a lens flair; I invite others to to do the same.

  20. Duh. Helen Keller could see this is lens flare.

  21. Airman says:

    Reminds me of the lightning “sprites” filmed in the upper atmosphere above thunderstorms.

  22. Xanthippa says:

    No need to worry!

    These aliens are obviously just dropping in for a friendly drink!

    They probably just mistook the ethanol plant for a pub!

  23. They're_coming_to_get_you_Barbara says:

    Ooh oh….looks like God is using thumb tacks instead of duct tape to hold up the sky thing. Maybe the sky IS falling…

  24. Lone Wolf says:

    Yes! Aliens traveled thousand of light years just to watch us make fuel that is more expansive and worse for the environment than the gas we use now.
    You know what they’re doin’ up there? Huffin’ off a bongs and saying “Hu,hu, hu. Those monkeys are stupid.”

  25. Buzz says:

    #13; right. And if you look at the original ethanol plant image, you see just as many faint UFOs as there are lights in the plant, organized in neat rows, just like the lights.

    No Photoshop needed.

    Nor does the original story refer to them as “objects.”

    Actually: IFOs.

  26. wholly ghost says:

    It’s the Rapture! Crap! I’m still here with
    you atheists!

    On a more serious note…. Lens flare. If you
    follow the objects ‘spikes’ down , the converge
    on the brightest light source near the middle-bottom.

  27. tekitsune says:

    I actually ran into this “phenomenon” a few months back while taking some night shots in Chicago, over the Chicago River. I’ve got one of the photos online on my Flickr page. You can see the “object” in the sky just to the right at the top of the building in the center of the photo.

    I thought it strange at the time, but now that I’m seeing almost the exact same thing other places that I got on some of my shots, I’m wondering if it has something to do with the camera or the lens used. Has anyone out there been able to check and see what kind of camera and lens that were used on these shots? I had just bought a new Nikon D3000 and was using the stock 18-55mm lens. Looking at the image in Photoshop, running a line down and looking at the angle of the “object” it does look like it’s just a lens flare, but it sure does make for some strange stuff. Never had that happen with any other cameras I’ve used int he past. Just kinda funky.

  28. mahrain says:

    http://home.comcast.net/~ststcsolda/federation/spacedock/spacedock.html

    It’s a space dock from Star Trek TNG. Seriously, exactly the same!

  29. Mondain says:

    Looks a bit like this new Hubble object traveling 11k MPH. http://gizmodo.com/5462539/hubble-detects-mysterious-spaceship+shaped-object-traveling-at-11000mph
    Why this shape all of the sudden? Why now?


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