One thing most people do not know about me is that I have had a life-long fascination with stories of UFO's (Unidentified Flying Objects). Not so much with the objects themselves, rather I am attracted to the stories and reports. When I was very young, I was interested in space flight and solar travel. Back in the days of the Apollo Program (or Project Blue Book, if you prefer otherwordly travel), the best way I found to get my fix was to read dozens of cheap, pulpish library books that documented UFO sightings, landings, and even abductions. This was years before the X-Files, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or even Star Wars. These were raw, rather disturbing stories told before the mass media standardized our cultural collective vision of alien vistors and their craft.
What would bring somebody to relate in public the sighting of a UFO? Whether you are a believer in extraterrestrial intelligence or a skeptic, the motive to come forward as a witness to a UFO can be powerful. Either way, the I find the stories compelling.
Now that I have a lot of experience in photomanipulation, I think I can debunk many UFO images I have seen. Still, the question remains equally pertinent between how the image was taken as well as to why it is being shown.
Yesterday's etherial post gave me the inspiration to search the Internet to find out if there are any notable UFO sightings in my neighbourhood. Remarkably, there was an encounter in summer of 1973 that was quite spectacular: three young boys near the river watched a silver saucer land in the nearby forest. While they remained briefly to see what might transpire, the object emitted a tremendous amount of energy, and the boys were too afraid to stay at the scene. Afterwards, investigators found mysterious charred powder and pressure marks in the soil. Apparently, lab work failed to identify any unusual substances.
A local newspaper took up the story and locals speculated in depth as to what may have transpired. Unfortunately, the paper is defunct (and thank you BlackPress so very much for stifling independant local newsgathering), so I am having trouble finding back issues.
The Internet report is also a little sketchy, and contains geographical errors. This makes pinpointing the reported landing site difficult, but if I were to guess, I think there may be a loop of a highway overpass cloverleaf that surrounds the site. Nothing remarkable remains of the encounter, unless maybe government agents kept top-secret artefacts in a hermetically-sealed drawer at the bottom of an Iron Mountain subterranean storage facility, right next to the DNA sample from the Sasquatch.
Keep watching the skies!
I created the image above by combining a free-usage picture of three boys with a no-UFO photo I took of the sky, and a photo of a silver metal bowl. Using these images as references, I painted the rest using my stylus.
As a note, people seem unlikely to take pictures of the back of their children's heads, and then post them on the Internet. It took a long time for me to find a suitable reference.
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