As one of those scientific types, I'm a strong believer in weather balloons, peculiar atmospheric inversions, and so on. Amateur astronomy is a hobby of mine. I was at a stargaze over fifteen years ago, walking around, looking through other people's telescopes. A small group stood around one 'scope, and none of us could understand what we were seeing. A dot of light, like a satellite, was moving around in a limited area, may one quarter degree, maybe one half. It was meandering around like a firefly.
If the object had been close, it would have quickly disappeared out of the telescope's field of view. An orbiting satellite has to follow a trajectory and can't cavort. A balloon would be drifting on the wind and wouldn't be able to stay within a small area. A weather balloon that reached orbit would burst, not prance around. It wasn't some strange aerobatic airplane or helicopter, because that would have been resolvable in the telescope.
We took turns staring at it for a while, and then kind of lost interest and went back to looking at galaxies and nebulas. Not the effect first contact is supposed to have. |
