In 2009, we were on our annual holiday in Cornwall, staying in a cottage near Penzance. Here is Penzance, the last town in England and still plagued by pirates. Look for the sun tanned arrow:
On August 17th , around half past eleven in the morning, we arrived at Men an Tol, one of the most famous landmarks in this part of the world. Here’s its location, right out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by other megalithic sites and lots of place names in Cornish. Look for the orange arrow again:
Men an Tol is a megalithic monument, supposedly, and we set off along the rough path out to the moors:
It was a nice day, lots of heather in bloom:
Standing stones are so plentiful in Cornwall that farmers even used them to build dry stone walls:
Here is a decidedly average photograph of the monument we were going to see. It is a uniquely arranged Stone Age structure, although I have always felt that if it is uniquely arranged, that may be a negative feature rather than a positive one:
Here’s a better one:
Just for scale, the stones are perhaps three or four feet tall. I didn’t dare try to crawl through the hole, for obvious reasons.
There were a number of buzzards circling in the blue sky. This is a Common Buzzard:
The birds were all little dots high in the sky but I took some photographs, thinking that I could perhaps blow them up later on.
It must have been a couple of months later, as I worked my way through far too many mediocre photographs of our holiday that I noticed something a little out of the ordinary. Here is a full size photograph and the buzzards are still just tiny dots. Note the bracken though, because that will prove where I took all the photographs:
Here it is blown up. There are three buzzards in shot and the bracken is still there. Notice the tiny white cloud because that will reappear.
I started to try and look at the buzzards by blowing the picture up a little more. The little white puff of cloud is still there:
I immediately noticed something strange off to the right so I blew it up yet again. The white puff of cloud provides continuity of evidence:
What on earth is that? I blew it up again :
And again:
And this is the best I could do. I used “unsharp mask” on it this time:
I do not know what this object was. At the time I did not even know it was there. It may have been an inflatable balloon or something from a pop concert or a festival of some kind, but that really is clutching at straws. No events like that happened in the area during our stay there. And it must have been quite big. A buzzard’s wingspan is around five feet and it is certainly bigger than that. I have never seen a children’s balloon that big. You could argue that it was a lot closer than the buzzards. But surely then I would have noticed it. Sooooo….by definition, it must have been a UFO. I just wish I’d seen it!
Incidentally. I have done very little with Photoshop to these pictures. They have been cropped, resized and may have had their brilliance and contrast levels changed to make the images clearer. These photographs are completely honest, in other words.
It certainly looks like a space ship. Did you see any little green men in the bar later?
No, I don’t drink alcohol.
John, it does look like a UFO. A time will come when our governments will no longer be able to deny or cover up info about alien visitations to our planet.
Yes, it does, although I suppose it could be some kind of inflatable. It’s certainly not a blurred bird because there’s one or two of those there and it’s nothing like them. I still don’t feel that I saw it though, not in the real sense!
Weird, indeed
I agree, Derrick. I think ultimately I shall just have to file it under “Don’t know” , although I would like some kind of rational explanation.
It’s certainly an odd shape. An aircraft would be more elongated, its not a bird, so must be a UFO! How weird!
Unless it was an inflatable of huge size, I have no idea what it was. Let’s hope some kind of photographic analyst reads my blog!
Let’s hope so!
Obviously a UFO in the truest sense of the word!
Looks like maybe a Mylar balloon? Or maybe an odd drone? I’m often amazed watching lights from the airport at night; a simple landing light might be visible 50 miles out on a clear night. And it will appear to just hang there until the aircraft turns and seems to zip off at warp speed.
Lacking good clarity and concrete reference points it’s very hard to sort out the details!
I would have said that the object was no more than a couple of miles away. If you look at the map above, I don’t think it was too far past the yellow road in the bottom left.
Overall, I would agree with you. It will have to be classified as a “UFO in the truest sense of the word”.
Whoa!! John, it looks like a flying saucer! I almost fell off my chair when I saw this picture. Now you have ME wondering what all I’ve caught with my camera that I do not know about. How exciting that you actually documented a suspected UFO! Goosebumps!!
It just took me about 18 months to notice what it was, or rather what it looked like. I really cannot explain it. At the time I would have thought that it was just one of the soaring birds. Perhaps when I get to heaven, they’ll tell you all the things you missed in your lifetime….six UFOs, four aliens, countless Bigfoots and the Loch Ness monster twice!
I would so much love to know that it really was a intergalactic investigating ship. But because you can’t identify it, it is by definition an Unidentified Flying Object.
Absolutely. The main problem is working out the size. I took it to be the same size as the birds but it could have been a lot further away. I suppose I’ll never know for certain, which makes it, as you say, an Unidentified Flying Object!
It ***could*** be a speck of dust on your camera lens….?
Yes, I think that’s perfectly correct and in fact, it was a suggestion which had never occurred to me. Perhaps the problem is that I have enlarged the photograph so much that the speck of dust is no longer recognisable as such and looks like a UFO.
On the other hand, I have enlarged the photograph so much that original speck must have been almost microscopic in size to begin with.
If you look at the picture of the monument, taken a minute or so before, the “dust” is not on it. I also think that if you look at the actual pictures of the birds and use the clouds and the plants as landmarks, it is by no means certain that the mystery object is in the same place in each shot. I’m not totally 100% sure of this but that’s how it looks to me, admittedly on a rather old computer screen.
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