The citizens of New York City are used to seeing bizarre and unusual things. Last Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at about 1:30 p.m. they got an eyeful of something that left them gawking in wonder. A number of bright silvery round objects were seen to seemingly drift over Manhattan Island. As quickly as possible, cell phones and video recorders came out to document the sight and it quickly spread to the Internet. UFO's were flying over the City!

Video - Manhattan UFO Mystery in New York City

Speculation ran high with various news agencies reporting possible natural reasons for the silver spheres in the sky. Balloons were the first suspected culprits, but where did they launch from? Initial guesses included the opening of a new mall although such an official balloon release would have to have been registered with the authorities. Finally an official conclusion was reached and reported.

A few hours after the initial sightings, Angela Freeman , the head of Mount Vernon's Milestone School spread the word that they were in fact, helium balloons that had escaped from the engagement party of one of their teachers. They said that a dozen of the four dozen purchased had been accidentally released as they were being brought into the building. All well and good - except for the glaring lack of consistency and thoroughness of the reporting.

The NYDaily News reported the balloons at a height of approximately 5,000 feet. With no clouds in the sky for even a rough comparison reference and nothing showing up on radar, their reported "fact" could only have been pulled out of the same thin air as the objects were floating in. From the photograph provided by the NYDaily News of a group of balloons that made it to the teacher's party they seem to be about a foot in diameter at their thickest. Would something that small still be visible to the unaided human eye at that distance?

The report on Live Science.com at least mentioned that the prevailing wind that day could have carried balloons in the direction the objects were seen to go, a fact glaringly missing from all the major networks' reports except FoxNews.com quoting meteorologist Brian Ciemnecki from The Weather Channel. Still, some witnesses said the objects hovered for as long as 45 minutes before moving off.

At least one photograph has been posted on the Internet from popfi.com which attempts to show a group of balloons floating up into the sky. Even a casual examination makes this picture suspect as the "balloons" are clearly not the same size. It also shows the group bunched together as though still tied tightly. The objects that went over Manhattan were all distinctly separate.

While many ufologists and believers feel the major news media generally ignores UFO reporting, it is probably just as well they do since they never tend to take it seriously and often still treat the subject with the contempt and ridicule made popular by the United States Air Force's Project Grudge in 1950.

The people are a disappointment as well. Surely in one of the most populated cities on our planet there would have been at least one set of binoculars or a small telescope that could have focused on the slow-moving objects to get a confirmation that they were actually balloons. Still, all we have are inconclusive cellphone video and pictures and conflicting accounts of what was seen. Since no one has recovered one of these wayward objects and proved the balloon explanation, they do remain unidentified flying objects in the true sense of the phrase, however unlikely they were of extraterrestrial origin.

But in ending this, compare video of similar looking objects over Mexico City on January 22nd, 1999. No one tried to blame it on balloons then.

Video - UFO Swarm over Mexico City, January 22, 1999

On March 10, the Cleveland Fox affiliate aired a feature detailing Eugene Erlikh’s repeated UFO sightings: For six straight nights, Erlikh had seen the same cluster of lights over Lake Erie. On the last night, he had the presence of mind to videotape their appearance, capturing their pulsating beams and changing colours. Erlikh also had the good sense to enlist the support of a corroborating witness, his close friend Nick Hausen, who also saw the lights, confessing, “I have never seen anything like that.”

The Fox Cable Network picked-up the story, which spread to CNN and through the networks to hundreds of local stations. Erlikh told the Cleveland Fox-8 reporter who broke the story, “Once you see it with your own eyes, you’re gonna say ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’ And why do they keep coming back to the same spot?”

Not surprisingly, NASA, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Canadian Coast Guard said they had received no other reports of sightings. At the Cleveland Ufology Project, self-styled UFO experts scrutinized Erlikh’s video, concluding inconclusively. Richard Lee, unofficial spokesperson for the Ufology Project, said the video was too rough, grainy, and unsteady to be of any use to scientists. As the story attracted national attention, however, other UFO sighters reported similar phenomena, and observers detected hints of a trend.

Distinctive lights frequently reported nationwide, worldwide.
Three words recur in recent UFO sightings from across North America and Europe—“pulsating,” “string,” and “orange.” Many reports closely resembling Erlikh’s describe brilliant strings of lights flying in precision formations and complex patterns, and a few other videographers have captured images like those on Erlikh’s footage.

On December 15, 2009, a husband and wife in O’Fallon, Missouri, observed and documented a string of bright, pulsating lights in the western sky. Two days later, in Springerville, Arizona, near the site of some history’s most famous UFO incidents, two US Air Force veterans reported seeing a string of lights and then an exceptionally bright flash in the eastern sky. They said the flash covered at least 10% of the sky, leaving “a pronounced after-image.” On February 14, 2010, nearly twenty different witnesses spread across six British cities reported “an orange fireball travelling in a perfect line north-northeast [in] complete silence.” Later that night, several witnesses reported the same phenomenon over Dublin, Ireland.

Scientists neither confirm nor deny.
Noting the consistency among the reports, and also noting that they could see no sign of collusion among the reporters, space scientists nevertheless offered their usual response. Experts acknowledged that they cannot definitively identify or explain the phenomenon, and they agreeing that the series of reports breaks from most historical observations of unidentified spacecraft. Yet astronomers showed restraint in their comments. “We remain neutral and disinterested as we examine these phenomena,” said one southern California researcher, “and we agree that all explanations fall into the realm of plausibility. We try, however, to look at the explanations most probable and then most possible. While decidedly intriguing, none of these observations defies explanation by the capabilities of man-made aircraft.”