Most photographic orbs depict dust motes close
to the camera lens, as has been demonstrated
by stereoscopic photographs (one shows the
orb, the other does not). This photo still
accurately represents some of the other types
of orbs I've seen. Photo by snowflakespice;
License CC 2.0

On an early summer afternoon in 1989 I happened to be sitting in my living room in the Ozarks looking out through the front door when something unusual happened. A silver orb of light moved through the clear sky in a descending curve towards the west. This globe glinted with metallic light but didn't appear to be solid. It moved faster than any airplane or balloon could move and seemed headed for an impact with the ground a few miles away. I jumped up and ran out, expecting to see a plume of smoke and a fireball over the west ridge, but I saw nothing. Throughout the afternoon and evening I scanned the local radio stations for news of what I thought must have been a large meteor, but no one ever reported anything at least that matched what I had seen. The few people I mentioned the sighting to thought that I was making it up or hallucinating.

That one sighting set me on an interesting personal journey which eventually put me in touch with many people in that area who were seeing similar events. Many sightings involved globes of light which moved in unusual ways, and most people thought of these objects or orbs as UFO's.

I didn't see just the one. Over the next few years I witnessed at least a dozen, and if I took the time to sort through my memories properly I'm sure I could come up with more. In the local newspaper occasional accounts of globes witnessed by dozens of local people surfaced. One large red globe was seen floating just over the treetops in a remote area, shortly before dawn, and appeared to move into the ground.

Brown Mountain, one of my favorite places to camp.

I became accustomed to these strange events, which at least where I lived were not rare. I saw them outside, or in the house, in daytime and at night, alone or in the company of other people. The orbs seemed real enough, but behaved as physical objects should not. The orbs emerged from walls, crossed rooms and passed out through solid objects. Sometimes the orbs stopped in midair and simply vanished. Outside I sometimes saw these odd lights hovering high in the sky, then abruptly moving away at impossibly high speeds or diving into the ground in an arcing or spiraling path.

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Last night this strange object reportedly overflew western Canada, creating a strange spiral wake and a massive explosion in the sky. Several different photos have surfaced along with a few eyewitness reports. Two videos also show the event from start to finish.

There are some immediate problems with these reports. I'd love to believe in this footage, but even though I see a few things here which do connect to my own experience with strange phenomena, I see way too much which doesn't harmonize well with mundane skills I also have, like photography.

The explanation for the position and steadiness of the camera in the first video is that Stephen Murray, the source of the footage, films meteors with four stationary cameras set up outside his home. This is edited footage of the entire event, and only one of the cameras caught it. By the time he got outside the event was over except for the arrival of the shock wave.

That's plausible, but there's something going on here which doesn't look right. The multiple spirals in the contrail before the explosion do look computer generated.

This second video, sent to Weatherspace.com hours later, shows the same event through the window of a plane. Background sounds include engine noise and voices of some very calm and mildly surprised people who apparently were filming this precise spot for some reason, right at the critical moment. In the foreground the sharp silhouette of a plane's wing appears, and the window through which the film was taken is directly over the wing. No other plane structure is in view and again the camera is rock steady. The plane's course is about as smooth as things ever get, the wing doesn't even quiver in relation to the horizon. Again all that's suspicious, and some of the unusual details from the first film are absent in this one.

A photo published at Weatherspace claims to show the same event from the ground, but portrays a complex spiral path that doesn't show up in the two videos. This sort of image could be computer generated or created physically by image overlay. The videos don't back it up.

Witnesses commenting on the two videos and also claiming to have seen the event mention that the lights in the sky did not illuminate any ground objects. While I've noticed something similar to that in encounters I do consider real, in this case it's a too convenient explanation of why no one noticed what was happening and why you don't see that in the videos. Unless you were looking directly at it, you wouldn't know it was up there. The likeliest explanation is that the event is fake and this is mentioned just to cover up faults in the footage. In the plane video, the object does light up the tip of the wing and part of the cloud layer, but only within the sphere of the expanding object. That either places the object about thirty feet from the plane or means the image is superimposed.

We'll have to wait and see how many people come forward with substantiating evidence and stories. Anything visible over a major city, as this event was, should have caught the attention of hundreds, if not thousands, who happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time. If we learned anything from the Norway Spiral it's that lots of us are watching, all the time.

Did early NASA photographs reveal
evidence of ancient alien
artifacts on the lunar surface?

I listen quite often to late night AM radio -- Coast to Coast AM usually -- and every now and then a guest shows up who really seems to make sense. It's amazing how sensible people can sound when in reality they probably don't even remember to wear pants. When Richard C. Hoagland talks about the ruins of Cydonia on Mars, for example, you can almost see the old skyline of crumbling pyramids as you walk down the dusty rubble-strewn reddish boulevard towards The Face.

Then later you go look at the photos and with a little imagination you can see what people were excited about, but it's just not convincing. Maybe it's the key to hyperdimensional physics, written in the dust of Mars for future Earth-bound descendants to decipher, or maybe it's just terrain. It's hard to tell from grainy photos.

Another interesting topic, one in which I have a personal interest, is the possibility of ancient artifacts on the Moon. I remember quite a few of those pictures making the rounds of science fiction magazines and checkout-counter newspapers in the early 70's.

Some were said to show the skeletons of old skyscrapers on the distant horizon of the lunarscape, and computer enhancements even pulled out details such as broken windows. Not that this made any sense on the Moon, where window panes might be a terrible architectural concept -- it was just interesting, and like the Face on Mars story, people were tempted to take it seriously. One photo which did strike me as very unusual showed a perfectly symmetrical white pyramid in the center of a lunar crater. The photo had been taken from orbit by one of the mapping missions which preceded Apollo.

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Iraqi child at night seen through night vision lense.
Photo by Master Sgt. Keith A. Milks.

I'm not scared of ghosts, but ghosts always scare me when I come across them myself. That happens often enough that I'm used to it. I accept the initial horror as a part of the contact. It's kind of like handling snakes. Some people can't do it, others learn that it's nothing to be afraid of, and still others learn to handle the dangerous kinds, the ones that kill you if you get a little careless. Ghosts -- or whatever it is that people describe in that way and other ways -- are like that. Sometimes if you grab one, you above all should not let go. Sometimes they're friendly. Most times they don't even show up.

Brown Mountain wasn't like that for me. I first went there because some folks I knew were convinced that an ancient spaceship was buried there, periodically giving off the beams of energy that people know as the Brown Mountain Lights of Linville, North Carolina. My friends told me I'd need a horse to explore the area thoroughly. On taking a look at the area I decided they'd probably never been there, because the country is rugged enough that you wouldn't see much of it on horseback. The mountain in areas off the many trails is pretty rough country and tough to even stand up in here and there.

On the other hand, it's interesting. The Brown Mountain Lights are famous, globes of energy rising from a particular spot on the mountain's bluffs at night, particularly in the fall of the year, and moving erratically about or zipping into the sky at high speed. Ghost lights aren't uncommon in other areas there, including Linville Gorge. Brown Mountain is quite a tourist attraction, with as many as two hundred cars parked along the Blue Ridge Parkway a couple of miles from the hotspot on nights when the ghosts are particularly active.

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The scariest things in this movie are the people who thought it was scary. Photo from http://www.paranormalactivity-movie.com/trailer.html

I watched this movie because I wanted to see what scared these people so badly. I was badly disappointed, but maybe it's because of the things I consider normal.

The movie Paranormal Activity begins with an optimistic quality in the same character as The Blair Witch Project but without the implication of reality that suckered me into that one some years ago. Katie and Micah, two people who are part of that mysterious southern Californian culture where every white person is rich without actually having to do anything for a living beyond being white, must confront a supernatural intrusion into their peaceful suburbian home. Micah, who I guess made his living telling people to buy stock when the prices were uniformly going up, and now is glad he's dead, thinks the whole thing is fascinating. Katie, his live-in girl friend, has personal experience with it and thinks it's creepy. So, for some reason, they decide to put it all on film -- maybe because that's what everybody seems to do these days.

http://www.paranormalactivity-movie.com/

We're treated to several weeks worth of selected footage from home and bedroom as Micah increasingly makes himself into a rude video-taping pest and Katie slips over the edge into New Age ritualistic physics and eventual demonic possession. The ending isn't unexpected (Katie kills Micah with the same kitchen knife we see in the beginning of the movie, and then dramatically leers into the camera lens) and comes far too late for those of us who were terribly bored with this story.

But from a paranormal viewpoint, is there anything of value here? Is any of it based on something real? Well, no. This is just a movie, and it accidentally bears some resemblance to strange events which are real, and aren't all that uncommon. It's not the sort of thing many people talk about in public, but the few who have done so have been pretty loud. Either they wrote books, made movies, or wound up in asylums.

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