I tried to photograph it, but even at 35x it doesn't look much.
I had a go at taking some pics of a jet up at cruising height, where the sky begins to turn that darker blue.I lay back and considered my next target, when I noticed a little black line in the sky. It was slightly curved and at first I thought it was a buzzard up high. The line shrank to a dot, and then stretched out to a line once more. It was something long, tumbling and rotating, giving the illusion of changing shape. Desperately I tried in vain to train the camera at it, but there was nothing to reference the position to. Eventually I decided to put the zoom at full optical (35x), point roughly in the right direction and perform a crude 'raster scan' of whole area. Bingo! There it was!....
To all the world it looked like a modelling balloon....
...but this was big! When I first spotted it, it had passed above the con trail of the passenger jet that I photoed at the same magnification. Logic dictates that this was as long or longer than the jet plane!
I've seen planets, meteors, glints from satellites and often seen weather balloons, but nothing like this. If it was some sort of huge wacky weather balloon where was all the equipment that normally hangs down below? The way it was tumbling wouldn't have allowed anything like that without getting tangled.
It was a real struggle keeping the thing in frame at that zoom, my arms were starting to ache.
Any movement would cause the object to skip about, so I held the shutter button firmly down with the camera clacking away taking five pictures a second!
With the SD card rapidly filling up, I switched to video downloading to the hard drive. With all the messing about with buttons, the object fell out of frame. Damn..... Oh, there it was, got it back again...relief!
Now on movie I attempted to zoom in further, 50x, 80x, 100x, 150x...No it was all too much, I just couldn't hold it steady enough.
The last three pictures were lifted from video. I was a little disappointed that the higher magnification pics didn't come out very clear, this was because I didn't have time to bump up the shutter speed to max. So these were the best that I could get.
To all the world it looked like a modelling balloon....
...but this was big! When I first spotted it, it had passed above the con trail of the passenger jet that I photoed at the same magnification. Logic dictates that this was as long or longer than the jet plane!
I've seen planets, meteors, glints from satellites and often seen weather balloons, but nothing like this. If it was some sort of huge wacky weather balloon where was all the equipment that normally hangs down below? The way it was tumbling wouldn't have allowed anything like that without getting tangled.
It was a real struggle keeping the thing in frame at that zoom, my arms were starting to ache. 
Any movement would cause the object to skip about, so I held the shutter button firmly down with the camera clacking away taking five pictures a second!
With the SD card rapidly filling up, I switched to video downloading to the hard drive. With all the messing about with buttons, the object fell out of frame. Damn..... Oh, there it was, got it back again...relief!
Now on movie I attempted to zoom in further, 50x, 80x, 100x, 150x...No it was all too much, I just couldn't hold it steady enough.
The last three pictures were lifted from video. I was a little disappointed that the higher magnification pics didn't come out very clear, this was because I didn't have time to bump up the shutter speed to max. So these were the best that I could get.I have absolutely no idea what this thing was. All I can say was that it did exist (I saw it with the naked eye as well as the camera), it was grey black, shiny (the sun glinted off it, but didn't shine through it), it wasn't powered (it tumbled in the direction of the prevailing wind, but slower), it had no markings and had nothing attached to it. If you know what it is then let me know, cos I'm stumped.
6 comments:
Wow strange....that's so wierd have no idea what it could be.
just seen your post below and was enjoying the pics of Barr Beacon then saw the last pic and I am like no way...is that me!!!
So would you say the object appeared to be falling from the sky or was it flying in an odd manner?
@ Elisa- Yes, that's you. This is one of a load of shots we did so that you could send them to an agency. Still got the negatives, so if you want copies let me know (swap them for a set of pics from our camping trip to the Gower Peninsular Wales, never did get my copies!)
@ Lesley- The object wasn't falling, it seemed to maintian a constant altitude. The prevailing wind was SW, and it was travelling form SW to NE. I had coincidentally seen a sherical weather balloon nearly an hour ealier, it had been lower than the 'object' and moving much faster, at least twice as fast (keeping pace with the wind as you would expect). This 'object' didn't appear to be propelled. There was no pattern to its tumbling. It didn't exhibit any control and rotated on both axis randomely, completing a rotation every ten secs or so.
You may have stumbled on a state secret! How cool is that?
Have you contacted NASA? I think I would.
I'm no help here I've never seen anything like that before in the sky... let's just chalk it up to a UFO!
You must have some camera!
Hold on, is this another one of your special "cons"...that looks just like a silver spray-painted condom either filled with helium or suspended on fishing twine...AGAIN...
sheesh...
Don't you remember the LAST time the men in black came round...
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