I'm just curious really if any of you astute observers of science have ever encountered any actual unexplainable phenomena.Not counting what you see after a weekend 12 pack of course but actual inexplicable sights in the sky.
No i'm not a GLP member I just enjoy tormenting the lunatics (but in a nice way) however enough of that drivel has caused me to ask the "experts" and Spock won't take my calls anymore,*sigh* I miss In Search Of.
Well?

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Oh my God you killed Dr.Strangepork!

The "Anna Nicole" show having a second season, for the life of me I can't explain how that happened.

Seriously, no, I have not encountered any unexplainable 'phenomena' (which I assume you're meaning strange lights in the sky and so forth . . .)

Any "unexplained" object or event has a conventional explanation if one has an open mind and doesn't jump on the fringe bandwagon. A good example is the NOSS satellites, which I had the good fortune of seeing a few years back. Prior to the sighting I had no idea that the military had satellites that flew in formation and, while not thinking I saw ET, didn't initially know what it was I saw. If people see something they can't explain & do some honest research, whether an internet search or posting the sighting on this board, they will find that most things are explainable. As far as "UFOs" go, I believe some involve classified military craft and these won't be "officially" explained until years later, especially with some of the newer generation UAVs. I find "real" astronomy/science interesting enough without having to season it with GLP-type hocus.

One time almost 20 years ago I was out observing and saw this object form a spiral cloud right in the southern sky. It was shown in the newspaper the next day and turned out to be a satellite launch that went bad.

Good lesson for the paranoid - Don't jump to the we're under attack and the government is hiding it from us nonsense.

So the answer to your specific question is - NOPE.

I've seen a weather balloon that I only could explain because I was in the process of setting up my scope for the evening and swung it up to take a look.

Driving home one night there were patterned lights in the sky that seemed to move around and blink on and off near the horizon that were definitely not airplanes. Turned out they were security lights on houses in the hills across the valley that would become invisible as I drove and they would move behind trees and such. It was so dark that the parallax from driving manefested itself as movement of the lights themselves. It was the single most striking illusion I've seen of that type.

And just two nights ago I was driving home when I saw a perfectly rectangular bar of glowing red light near the horizon out of the corner of my eye that disappeared behind the hill. It was so extraordinary I stopped the car and asked my son if he had seen it. We turned around and drove back to check. Turned out it was the Moon just rising, with most of the face obscured except for a thin strip shining between two streaks of cloud. For a moment it was REALLY strange.

A few years ago I was at a remote observing site with 3 members of our local astronomy club. We spotted a star like object about 1st mag. with a faint cometary tail pointing down. The object moved from west to east as a satellite would. None of us had ever seen a satellite with a comet like tail, so we were at a loss to understand what we had seen. There was a space shuttle mission in progress at the time. After the mission, I read a review of the mission, and on the date that we were observing, the shuttle had conducted an experiment were they had released some gasses for some sort of observation. So we all concluded that we had seen the shuttle during that experiment.

last night at work i came out of the science building and was walking over to the patrol vehicle. as i was about to get in a movement caught my eye. i looked, and there were two large, bright lights over the building, and moving quickly. there is a huge tree beside the building, and most helicopters/planes take the better part of a minute to "pass" behind it if you are in the parking lot. this one zoomed past the tree in about fifteen seconds. i stood there trying to figure out what it was.

the lights were still moving on down the valley, and very bright. a moment later i heard the sound of a propeller coming through the night air. then i realized most of the planes i see pass behind it in day are quite high and distant. being night i couldn't see how far away it was, but it must have been quite close, and low. there is an airport only about two miles up the road, and the runway points right at the school. this airplane had probably just taken off and had not gone into the normal steep climb, opting instead to skim the valley for whatever reason.

i didn't think UFO, but i did wonder what the pilot was thinking, with only two lights.first i thought he had no tail light, but then i realized one was that, and one was a wing. the other wing was hidden by the craft body.

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None to speak of

The only officially unexplainable thing I have seen happened several years ago. It was a huge beam of light coming down from the sky and touching the ground off in the horizon. It was about 3 fingers wide and was seen at least 100 miles away. We called the police and they said it was also being reported all the way to a city that was 100 miles away.

It was in the paper but was not explained. Maybe satellites have the ability to shine beams of light down, that is the only logical explaination.

---I've got a few illogical explanations too! -but I'll spare you those

Yup have to say that I have seen 1 odd thing in the sky. silver metalic disc very shiny quite high up, not a weather ballon - unless they are made of metal these days - which they may be of course! Just gon 1pm in the after noon, just outside of Bath UK it sat for a while then gone, no idea what it was, who knows. so there you go.

I must have missed that one. When did it happen?

Perhaps it was the mad engineers that lurk here at Bath uni..........

If you have a local uni, all bets are off

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"We do not require reality to conform to the expectations of the ignorant"

There was a recent observation made about a blue nebula that was at a temperature of about 2 K which I think should not exist since it is colder than the background radiation.
It was in one of the recent astronomy magazines (Astronomy or Sky and Tel.). I do not remember which one.

Any comments about this?

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aka Michael Cyrek

Besides the obvious contradiction? If its blue, its not at 2K.

Bet good money the image was colored after the fact to bring out details.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

One night was walking out to my car. I saw an object in the sky above me. It was a glowing white sphere. It looked to be about 1000' up and 50' in diameter. It was bobbing and weaving strangely as it moved swiftly across the sky.

This impression lasted about 2.3 seconds when I realized it was just a balloon from a party down the street illuminated by streatlights.

Here's alink to that cold nebula. Very interesting that something can be colder then the CMB.

http://www.astronomy.com/Content/Dyn...1/218hdziz.asp

~Bub

AHHHH! the plot thickens

The date, probably about 2 years ago + now, early summer, on the duel carriage way going out toward Bristol

i posted one earlier, but i've since remembered another strange thing.

a few years ago i was driving with my family (ok, ok...they were driving, i was with) across Nevada when we saw a strange light over the next hill. it wasn't so much the light source, as just the shine though. at first we thought it was a city, but there were no large cities on the map. besides that, it was too white to be a city. (at least where i come from cities appear orange/pink, sorry if they are white for someone).

as we watched, it grew brighter and brighter. then we thought maybe it was a train climbing the hill, but the light was too spread out for that, not in any sort of a beam. we watched for several minutes, until suddenly...

the Moon jumped over the hill!

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None to speak of

What latitude were you and what time of day?

Daytime there are these rays that go horizon to horizon when the Sun is setting. I forget the details.

But at night, well that is EXACTLY how the aurora borealis looked last night from Seattle, (~45th parallel). It started as one, very straight beam of light that went across the sky like a searchlight beam. Later it faded in and out and then it faded away.

I've seen the aurora look like that before where it was several columns of light that went straight up from the horizon to the sky.

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Democracy Now! - The lost art of investigative news reporting.

Myself and my two brothers had a UFO encounter in the 60s. We were walking to a restaraunt down the street from our house, late but not quite dark out yet. We saw a light that seemed like a kind of rocket a long way off. It shot straight up in the sky and had brown trailing smoke.

No big deal except it wasn't in the direction of any airforce or other potential launch area.

Still could have been a small rocket launched by anyone..... but then.....

I told my grade school teacher about it. No big deal, but then.......

A few days later a friend of hers described a UFO over them at Catalina Island. It was described as an oval disk like object. It hovered over them, close enough to be easily seen. It had some kind of lights. Then it shot straight up in the sky with a trailing cloud of brown smoke.

My teacher told the whole class about it and she said she would have had a harder time believing the story except she remembered what I had described. The date, time and direction were confirmed to be the same. We were going out to dinner because my parents had gone to a nicer restaraunt by themselves for their anniversary so there was no question on the details.

Well, I'm sure my brain has polished the story with time but it has definitely been a memory that has stayed with me all these years. I've even thought of searching through news archives to see if I can find any news reports about it from the time. Maybe when I get the time to write my memoirs. 8)

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Democracy Now! - The lost art of investigative news reporting.

cyrek1 wrote:
Any comments about this?

Russ Waters wrote:
Besides the obvious contradiction? If its blue, its not at 2K.

cyreks reply:
You are right. Instead of 2K, it is 1K.

Doodler take note.

Bubble Gum has the URL on her comment following yours.

To Bubble Gum, thanks for the post. That is the nebula I had in mind.

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aka Michael Cyrek