UFOs or Chinese Lanterns?


There have been a couple of videos making the rounds this past weekend that depict a triangle formation in the skies over Lafayette, Colorado.

Many are claiming these are UFOs in formation while some are saying it’s just another case of the Chinese lantern craze. They do look an awful lot like lanterns to me, however several witnesses have said that there was nothing connecting them to maintain the formation. Of course anyone that could see fishing line in the night sky has superhero vision in my opinion.

Here’s the tabloid story from The Daily Mail/Mail Online:

UFO frenzy goes into overdrive as three red lights hover over Colorado town

By Daily Mail Reporter

It’s the latest internet sensation – amateur footage of three red lights in a triangular formation hovering in the night sky above the town of Lafayette in Colorado.

The video, shot last Monday, shows that the sky was clear and witnesses said they could not see anything connecting the lights.

Leroy Vandervegt, a 50-year-old who has lived in Lafayette for 16 years, shot the video Sunday evening after his 17-year-old son saw the glowing orbs move from south west to south east along the horizon.

‘I had no idea what it is,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a satellite, it wasn’t an airplane and it wasn’t a helicopter.’

By Friday, five days after posting, more than 39,000 people had watched the video on YouTube, dailycamera.com reports.

Mr Vandervegt said the lights made no noise and did not blink.

The lights remained in a triangular shape as they moved forward, though the shape of the triangle changed.

Denver International Airport officials would not talk about the sighting but, intriguingly, Allen Kenitzer, the Federal Aviation Administration’s spokesman for the Rocky Mountain region, said his staff didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

Mr Kenitzer said: ‘To the best of our knowledge, radar returns showed no abnormal unidentified activity within our airspace in references to the three triangular formation red lights as being reported.’

Doug Wilson is the Colorado director for the Mutual UFO Network, an organization that strives to learn the origin of UFO phenomena through the collection and analysis of UFO data. He received four reports of the UFO sighting and is sending investigators to the scene.

‘It’s unusual for us to have a single event with multiple reports,’ he said. ‘It’s not just somebody pulling our leg.’

He added that three red lights in a triangle is a common pattern for UFOs.

Astrophysicist Adam Frank, however, poured cold water on the reports, questioning why a planet-hopping spaceship would need headlights.

He said: ‘Any civilization with technology capable of spanning light-years ought to be able to hide themselves well enough to avoid detection from hairy apes with jet-planes like us.

‘Of course, the lights might be their engines but a species crossing trillions of kilometres of empty space is not going to be using rockets. Hopefully they have some other kind of “hyperdrive” or something cool.’

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1370307/UFO-frenzy-red-lights-hover-Colorado-town.html

Frankly I am not convinced that this is anything otherworldly and although it does qualify as a UFO incident, Chinese lanterns is pretty darn good guess at this point. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, lights in the sky at night are just not that impressive to me.

10 comments

Sponsors