Thursday, April 05, 2007

UFO's or Pelicans?



Personally, based on ARNOLDS original sketch, I doubt he saw birds! Why? Well, because he drew a half circle with two straight ends. The round part is rather wide and in no way resembles the body of a Pelican. I suspect that the later pics of the Arnold sighting are most probably an artists rendition...they took artistic license, and yes, you could then argue that the pic we have seen of the Kenneth Arnold SAUCER resembles a bird...vaguely.

2 comments:

Rich said...

Here is in part what was written about the Kenneth Arnold sighting in Wikipedia. I did not try fact checking this. Based on the below, it certainly seems he didn't see a flock of geese or even pelicans.

"They flew in a long chain, and Arnold for a moment considered they might be a flock of geese, but quickly ruled this out for a number of reasons, including the altitude, bright glint, and obviously very fast speed. He then thought they might be a new type of jet and started looking intently for a tail and was surprised that he couldn't find any.

They quickly approached Rainier and then passed in front, usually appearing dark in profile against the bright white snowfield covering Rainier, but occasionally still giving off bright light flashes as they flipped around erratically. Sometimes he said he could see them on edge, when they seemed so thin and flat they were practically invisible. According to [Jerome] Clark[3] Arnold said that one of the objects was rather crescent shaped, while the other eight objects were more circular, but initially Arnold's descriptions were only of the latter disk-like shape."

Rich said...

After reading some stuff on temperature inversions and mirages, it seems possible that he could have witnessed a flock of some birds. Images of things can be bounced around quite a bit to give rise to false altitude calculations and give off shimmers amongst other things. Having said this, if what he saw were indeed physical objects at a high altitude and going at very high speed, then this would seem to just leave us with the "craft(s)" explanation. So, it seems, we are left with another unsolvable case.