From: kymhorsell@gmail.com   
      
   On Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at 4:10:21 AM UTC+10, phister wrote:   
   ...   
   > I am very old and have been interested in unexplained phenonema for ~70    
   > odd years, but not seen either a UFO or a ghost. I have a picture of a    
   > strange structure on the dark side of the moon, courtesy of Google Earth.    
   ...   
      
   Jacques Vallee is very old -- if you think 80+ is old. :)  He relates a story   
   of working at an observatory in his youth where he was "disappointed" when a   
   telescope captured pix of things flying across the sky and his boss threw them   
   away because they    
   were rubbish. "We see these all the time" he was told. "We ignore them".   
      
   Pictures can be interesting but are nothing compared with lived experience.   
   They can also be a let-down. :)   
      
   Two of the recent ones doing the rounds on special interest groups illustrate   
   the pitfalls. Both were from Mars robots. One showed some strange shape in the   
   sky near the horizon. The other was a picture of what looked like a doorway   
   cut into the side of    
   a hill.   
      
   Analysis showed the "thing in the sky" was most likely a spec on the camera   
   lens because in several images it was in exactly the same position to the   
   pixel. It was also not visible from other angles covering the same part of the   
   landscape at the same    
   time.   
      
   The doorway was interesting but hard to say whether it was natural or not.   
   Some people insisted it was an optical illusion -- like one of those   
   "installations" created by an artist hanging a bunch of stuff from strings and   
   forming an image if viewed from    
   one angle. It sure looks like the kind of thing an earthmoving machine on   
   Earth would make. But on Mars could it happen naturally over millions of years?   
      
   I've seen many blobs on the moon from various photos. Always a problem to   
   figure them out. Some are -- unknown to the viewer -- patched together from   
   images taken at different times and the shadows have moved and made it look   
   like something is there when    
   it isn't. The shadows anyway can make it look like a dome is there when it is   
   actually a crater. If only they had video of the spot and we could see how it   
   changed over time or run it through a s/w that can extract 3d from images.   
      
   Nothing really is as good as your own eyes and brain. I've taken pix of things   
   and been totally disappointed what I caught looked "nothing like" what I think   
   I saw at the time. Your eyes and brain see one thing from whatever is dancing   
   around in front of    
   you over seconds or minutes,  but the camera sees a blob over a fraction of a   
   scond that could be anything. :)   
      
   If you look up at night it's possible you have seen something unusual but just   
   not realized it.   
      
   It's gotten to the stage where I go out on a clear eveneing if I do NOT see   
   something fly across the sky that is not mundane then I get disappointed. :)   
      
   Some UFO researchers disregard "lights in the sky" (LITS) because they "could   
   be anything". But, to me, these are the most interesting because   
   they seem to happen "all the time" but most people just ignore them.   
      
   They have their little tricks tho. A light can appear suddenly anywhere in the   
   sky and hang motionless. Then disappear. All within a matter of a few seconds.   
   If you are not looking exactly at that part of the sky at the right time you   
   see nothing. Or    
   maybe you see something out of the corner of your eye come and go but by the   
   time you turn in that direction it is gone and you shake your head, say you're   
   seeing things, and go back inside.   
      
   Another little trick I have noticed is you turn around from looking one place   
   and you look at a couple of stars some other place. Nothing seems unusual.   
   Until you realize you dont remember seeing a pair of relatively bright stars   
   in that part of the sky earlier in the evenening. Keep watching. Sometimes one   
   of them moves off after sitting there a few sec. More than one time I keep   
   watching and the 2nd one moves off as well in the other direction.   
      
   Otherwise it's pretty much up to you to figure out what a satellite looks like   
   and whether this thing is behaving 100% like that. Satellites dont come from   
   the east, for example. The NE or the SE either. And sats curve toward the   
   equator not away from it.   
    They cant change direction in the middle of the sky. And they cant move   
   faster than about 5 sec across your finger, and they can't hang stationary or   
   near-stationary 45 deg N or S of the equator. When they move N/S or S/N (usu   
   slightly to the W of N/S    
   if they are polar sats) they have a minimum speed; if they are slower then   
   they just can't be in orbit.   
      
   But the best LITS events are where aircraft chase after them or in some way   
   "tangle" with them. It seems some countries have a policy of chasing them off,   
   esp near airports.   
      
   Sometimes at night I've seen military choppers "shake the clouds" and little   
   lights come out and run away. It's even gotten to the stage where this has   
   happened during the day. Just a couple weeks back I was sitting out with a   
   coffee and I looked up and    
   saw a small aircraft circling around the area at a good height. Eventualy I   
   noticde there were little white dots up there moving in and out and around the   
   few fluffy clouds. And the plane seemed to be trying to harass them into   
   leaving.   
      
   Once you have the knack of seeing these kinds of things you ten to see them   
   "all the time".    
   I'm fretting at the moment becase the last couple times the sky was clear   
   enough to see lots of stars none of them had been moving or shining purple   
   lasers in my eyes!   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)