Phoenix residents think they may have been visited by UFOs Monday night. The four mystery lights hovered over the city for 15 minutes before disappearing. And, there’s video:
It’s a lot harder to be an alien visitor these days. Back in the 1950s, a UFO could appear over any mid-sized city, do some flips, blow up some cattle and leave. If anyone saw them, the aliens could rest assured that any witness would be dismissed as a maniac, a communist, or Ed Wood.
Now, every podunk in America has a video camera in their pocket, making visits difficult and necessitating clever disguises, like some groucho glasses or a funny hat.
I call this the ‘Mike Skinner Phenomenon’, which the Streets frontman brilliantly elucidates in the song ‘When You Wasn’t Famous‘:
Right see the thing that’s got it all f*cked up now is camera-phones.
How the hell am I supposed to be able to do a line in front of complete strangers
When I know they’ve all got cameras?
Of course, for that to work, you need to replace “do a line” with “visit Earth” and “Complete Strangers” with “Hapless Earthlings”.
Of course, they could just be sky lanterns. But that’s not nearly as cool.
UPDATE: It looks like yes, they were balloons. Or maybe that’s what the aliens want you to believe.
It is true that our alien visitors are masters at disguising their sightseeing craft, yet once in a while they slip up.
Years ago, looking west up the Sound from Horseshoe Bay on a very bright summer day, we saw approaching us a glinting, shiny ovoid, not too large, perhaps the size of a cube van, moving through the air at a leisurely pace, its altitude about halfway between sea level and mountain top.
Obviously an alien Terra-watching craft doing the safari-tourist thing (”Don’t open the windows and don’t feed zerbles to the wildlife, folks, it makes them spontaneously combust!”), but we wondered why so brazen?
Well, not brazen at all, as it turned out, just sloppy. As the object came closer, it resolved into the image of a small silver-winged float plane, likely a four-seater, cruising along as innocent as you please.
One scoffer in the group maintained that the original appearance of a shiny ovoid was just a function of distance — too far to see detail — and the reflection of the sunlight off the silver wings, pontoons, and windows. But to the rest of us it was clear that the alien’s telepathic image-projectors were tuned to too short a range for the visibility conditions. This being the West Coast, perhaps they’d expected rain and forgot to recalibrate.
Their technology is pretty awesome, granted, but it’s comforting to realize they’re just as prone to error as we are.
/fantasy