Unstrange Phenomena by Ed Allison for November 20, 2023

They’re time travelers investigating UFO reports through history. I retired after the first half dozen turned out to be me.

Should make them look like plastic grocery bags.

Pie plates? Look up “lenticular clouds.”

And why are they always little green men? What, is purple considered gauche in the interstellar community?

J Edgar Hoover was right. They all do play Louie Louie.

There was an SF story back in the 60s that explained that first panel. They deliberately ionized the air around the hull to create the light shows. That way they were ignored since the ones who reported them had seen something too weird to believe. The second panel is easier. UFOs have always had many shapes. From blobs to saucers to triangles to complex machines. The thing about the saucer shape that bugs me is that in the famous first sighting by Kenneth Arnold in 1947, he described them as crescents moving in a skipping motion “like a saucer on water.” The press flacks, out of the clear blue vacuum in their heads only heard “flying” and “saucer”. And people immediately started seeing saucer-shaped flying craft. Think about it for a while.

One thing I noticed, on the video from passing aircraft during the Chinese weather balloon scare was that from above in the one-half second a pilot has to get a visual contact, was that they looked EXACTLY like flying saucers. At those speeds, even with zero ground speed, it appears to go past at the speed of the aircraft – nearly 500 miles per hour. Explains a lot of sightings.