Larry Sessions

I saw another UFO Saturday night. Once again in the car headed west, I spied a bright starlike object in the reddish post-sunset sky, low to the mountains. It was reminiscent of Venus as it appears deep in the sunset glow, but of course Venus is not in that part of the sky at sunset right now. I stopped long enough at a traffic light to determine that the object was drifting very slowly to the south. This motion was entirely consistent with what is frequently seen with incoming aircraft arriving, perhaps from Seattle, circling around Denver to land nose to the north wind at the airport.

Moments later I lost sight of this bright spot while we drove to a nearby Post Office to send out — guess what — tax returns. At this point I was convinced that the “UFO” was simply landing lights of an incoming jet. I don’t know of any better or more reasonable explanation. But if that were all there was, I would have forgotten it by now.

Minutes later when we parked at the Post Office and started to walk inside, I noticed another odd sight to the west. It was in the same general direction as before, but a little higher in the sky. I doubt that there was any connection between the two sightings, but this one was obviously not landing lights on a plane. Nor was it a weather balloon. It was larger and more diffuse that the first sighting, maybe roughly a quarter the size of a full moon. It was slightly rectangular or just oblong — I couldn’t be sure. It appeared in a relatively clear patch under a rapidly encroaching deck of clouds. My impression — and that is all it is because I have no actual evidence — was that this object was considerably farther than the clouds which were intervening. It looked like a small bit of jet contrail broken off and shining in the last rays of the sun. Caught off guard and camera-less, I did not get any photographs, although I’m pretty sure they would have appeared as a sunset with clouds and a barely distinguishable spot.

Now, I could jump to the conclusion that these two sightings — or perhaps two sightings of the same object — were outside the bounds of normal experience. I could jump to the conclusion, as some did with the image of “aliens” pictured here, that they were evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. I admit that such sightings would be fantastic, but there just isn’t any good evidence of that, and every reason to believe that what I saw had a much more mundane explanation.

By the way, the two “aliens” in the photo shown here made the rounds over the Internet recently when they appeared on the side of a house in Calgary, Alberta. They are striking, but hardly extraterrestrial. Instead, they are fairly complex and admittedly odd reflections off a nearby window, and only show up in the late afternoon when there are no clouds. It is understandable why people think they look like “aliens.” But it is as unreasonable to think that they are extraterrestrials communicating with us as to think that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Interesting idea, maybe, but hardly worth serious consideration.