There's something on the wing!

As I work my way through a three-year-long wishlist back-catalogue of Xbox games, there's a strong danger of everything I say being a discussion of my emotional response to Game Z and no-one wants to read that shit. Well, not every day.

So today, a post about UFOs.

It was probably an early sign of future geekiness that I was a fan of UFOs during my turgid early years.* I read and watched everything I could get my hands on concerning Unidentified Flying Objects, because the idea of Aliens was cool (obviously at this point I was unacquainted with the works of Ridley Scott and James Cameron).

These days I am of a much more sober disposition, reluctant to see evidence of extra-terrestrial involvement in every light that blinks after dark. My family's native skepticism has soaked deeply into my judgement. I take great care to subject all observed phenomena to rigorous testing.

To date I have seen three things that I could explain by no means within the realms of our day-to-day experience and knowledge. The first was as a child, in the back of a van on its way into town. The second was biking home from Capping Show rehearsal. The third was very recently, at the last of the great Campbell St parties.

The party had spilled onto the deck, as it tended to do, even in winter. I had taken a step away from the group to look at the stars. They were very clear that night. Something tweaked my peripheral vision, and I spotted a light moving toward the zenith from the north-west. "Oh, a satellite," I said, "I haven't seen one of those in ages." King Richard was the only person who heard me. He turned to watch.
Every satellite I've seen has displayed identical behaviour: they trundle across the stars in a straight line, never in very much of a hurry. The observation of a couple of seconds indicated that this light was moving at a real clip, much faster than a satellite, yet slower than a meteor. Furthermore, the light was very clearly moving on a curved path, arcing around toward the south.
The real kicker, however, took place a second or so later. Now heading very much toward the south, the light's path abruptly angled about 30 degrees to the left. It continued in this new direction before fading from view in the manner of something that's really far away. King Richard confirmed that he'd seen the same thing as I had.

OK, checklist time. Things that it could not have been: plane, meteor, satellite, atmospheric disturbance, cloud or other weather effect, reflection, swamp gas, weather balloon. So what was it?

This is often the point at which people launch straight off into the deep end with something like "OMG IT MUST BE ALIENS." I'm not prepared to make any definitive statement about what it was that I saw. I just know that it was damn fast, possessed a not inconsiderable agility, and was completely silent.

There's a change that has overcome the term "UFO" in the last ten or fifteen years, one that has delegitimised it and turned it into a flag for mental fragility. It's assumed that "UFO" automatically means some 1950s vision of Little Green Men, or big-eyed folks with smooth skin and a penchant for violating oroficial privacy, and that the folks who see them are a little on non-linear side. It certainly no longer means that for which is is an acronym, i.e. thing in the sky which cannot be readily explained away.

Dennis Kucinich, candidate for the Democratic nomination in the last US election cycle, got a pretty raw deal from the media along these lines. Besides appearing more obsessed with his wife Elizabeth than with his progressive policies, they also brought up his admission that he'd seen a UFO, with a definite "surely a prospective candidate for the US Presidency cannot seriously believe in such crazy things" angle. Kucinich was rightly all "I just meant I saw something I couldn't explain, fucking duh. Jimmy Carter saw one too, where's the media hackjob on him?" but the damage was done.

Anyhoo. If anyone's got any good Stories of the Inexplicable, I'd love to hear 'em. And to nip this one in the bud, the identity of whoever let the dogs out will likely remain one of the great mysteries of our time.

* "turgid" is just the greatest word.