UFO' Sceptic' is Baffled by Series of
Lights in the Sky.
March 20,
2009. Report from the Leicester
Mercury.
A dog walker was surprised to
see flickering orange
lights in the
sky.
Alec Garner,
32, was walking down a residential
street
when he noticed
a light in
the sky on Friday, March 20.
Alec, from Glenfield,
does
not believe in extra-terrestrials, but was mystified
by
what he saw.
A
few minutes after seeing the first
light, at 8pm, he saw another light following
the same
path. He said the lights
kept coming every three to four minutes and
all followed
the same route north-west, from Braunstone
towards
Groby.
Alec
was walking down Liberty Street in
Glenfield, with his dad, Michael, who also
saw the lights.
Alec said "I'm sure
other people would have noticed them. I
stopped and
watched them for a little while. I stopped
watching at
8.30pm, but
they were still going.
"I'm
not a believer in little green men so I think
there's a
plausible
explanation.
"I think there was a slight sound, they
wern't totally silent, I could hear something."
He
said the lights,
which flew at about
the same height as a
helicopter, looked like flames and
they
flickered
irregularly.
"There was no set pattern to it. There was
no flashing
light like planes have."
When Alec, a
cabinet-maker,
got home he took photos
of the lights on his digital
camera.
He said: "I'm not into UFO's. I think
there is
a rational
explanation.
A spokesman for the Met Office said there
were no weather balloons out at that time.
Similar
sightings across the
country have
been attributed to a
recent craze of "sky lanterns" -
small hot-air
ballooons
from China,
where they are released during festivals.
Linda Jones,
of Sky Lanterns, an Essex company that sells the
lights, said she
thought it was
likely that Alec had seen
a series of lanterns.
She
said: "we
have had so many
sightings
recently.
"Depending on weather conditions at the
time,
they can go extremely high and travel vast
distances."
However, Alec
remains
unconvinced, saying:
they followed a very straight
path."
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Reader Reply:
I would like to respond to the UFO article (Mercury, March
30).
It is obvious that Mr Garner has never looked into the UFO subject in any
depth, if at all, hence the hackneyed cliches such as
"little green men" and
"there is a
rational
explanation".
How is rational or irrational defined anyway? If he is not interested in the
subject, then fine, that is his prerogative. That being
the case, how can he
then make the
judgement that they
cannot exist if he does not look into
it.
So many people dismiss the subject without question. Maybe it upsets their
"comfort zones". It is much easier to accept the official
or mainstream view of
life and
"reality".
As regards the Chinese lantern explanation, of course these are the cause of
some sightings. Linda Jones, of Sky Lanterns, an Essex
company, mentioned in the
same
Mercury article, states she
thinks that is what Mr Garner
saw. "Thinks",
mind you, not
knows,
which is different. She did not witness the sighting
herself.
I give credit to Mr Garner for being unconvinced by Linda Jones' view.
When the explainable cases are subtracted from the many unexplainable ones,
that still leaves many genuine UFO sightings and
interactions. But do not take
my
word for it – take a look
for yourselves. It is time for
people to "wake
up".
Jonathan Barker, Birstall.
