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Protopterygotes / Sky Rods / Sky Fish

Flying rod or enormous dragon-fly?

I have decided to post this after both Jose Escamilla and cryptozoology.com ignored this sighting of an unknown creature - for reasons equally unknown. Perhaps this undermines their own views on the matter, who knows? I only discovered that such a thing as rods existed from a link on the FT message board, and I thought I'd add this true experience.

This happened to my mother back in mid-January. She referred to what she saw as a "flying stick" or a "enormous dragonfly". As you know, dragonflies have a long thin body, and she pointed at this similarity. Well, she came up to a living-room window at about 9:30 in the evening. She was about to draw the curtains for the night when something the size of a crow (bigger than a pigeon, as she estimated, because we have pigeons around this old house), but long, dark and thin "like a stick" dashed past the window and down the street. Then it disappeared in the darkness. What makes this creature different from typical rods is that it appeared to have wings but they rotated so fast they almost blurred, like airfoils of a helicopter. The entire sighting took about two seconds, but as mother was standing so close to the window at that instant she managed to take a very good look at it.

The street was quite well lit, and there was a white cloud in the background lit up by the lights of a neighbourhood oil refinery, so the viewing conditions were quite good. It was raining heavily at the time, but there was no wind, so it could NOT have been a stick flying in a gust of wind -- exactly what it would have looked like if it hadn't been alive!

Although Vancouver is a city of 2 million people, our suburban area (as most of Canada) is very close to real wilderness -- we had a black bear walking around this house at Christmas on fresh snow, and saw coyotes on our street many times, at night and even in daylight.

Perhaps some people who can't quite identify their own sightings as a 'rod' but rather as a living, unknown creature flying extremely fast would confess to seeing something of the kind. Maybe this puts a new spin on the whole concept?
 
,..,

My theory:

An insect. It's rod-like appearance simply an illusion created by travelling faster than the camera can capture a single frame. Thus creating a trail effect.
 
Re: ,..,

Diabolik said:
My theory:

An insect. It's rod-like appearance simply an illusion created by travelling faster than the camera can capture a single frame. Thus creating a trail effect.

the most famous ones are taken by a guy who sets his speed at 1/10,000 of a second. At that speed even a humming birds wings are frozen mid flap. so i assure you ANY insect would be frozen as a very clear well formed insect, as indeed they are. but these Rods still are a blur.

So the next step is obvious. cameras that have a 1/50, 000 shutter speed.
 
My theory: An insect. It's rod-like appearance simply an illusion created by travelling faster than the camera can capture a single frame. Thus creating a trail effect.

You don't get it, Diabolik: my mother DIDN'T take a picture - she saw that thing! It was about the size of a pigeon but long, thin and black, and moving on its own. Could be best described as a huge dragonfly. If you like to call it an insect, that's fine with me - at least it's an insect unknown to science!
 
What do you mean, as long as a pigeon? I always think of wingspan. do you mean it was about eight or nine inches long? How thick? two or three inches? Did it have eyes like a dragon-fly or none discernable like the stick you mention. Can't picture this easily, I'm afraid. Call me dim.

By the way. Didn't UFO magazine have a small article saying that a rod was seen around the space shuttle when in space and then some Mexican guy has given NASA video footage of a rod following it back into our upper atmosphere, coming alongside, then going back into its vapour trail just before it exploded? Apparently NASA demanded it so that it could be included in its investigations following the disaster. Wierd, eh? So you could say that THAT is a big point of reference for distance, speed, and for size that rules out insects!!!:confused:
 
....

Zardoz has already had me banged to rights Gloria, so shut your neck. :)

Chant, I saw a programme on Sky a while back about these things. The prog featured people "base jumping" off cliffs & these 'rods' were present in many of the photographs (in close proximity of the base jumpers)
 
Re: Re: ,..,

zardoz said:
the most famous ones are taken by a guy who sets his speed at 1/10,000 of a second. At that speed even a humming birds wings are frozen mid flap. so i assure you ANY insect would be frozen as a very clear well formed insect, as indeed they are. but these Rods still are a blur.

So the next step is obvious. cameras that have a 1/50, 000 shutter speed.

Oooh! are we still debating these?
which most famous ones are we talking about?
 
Well if it was in UFO magazine, it must be true... ;)
 
The pictures are good, but the accompanying 'explanation' is just ungrammatical blather! Basically he just claims that the rods are artifacts of the lens only, and does not discuss the video recording method, which (I feel) probably has the larger effect.

He doesn't give technical details of the camera, which suggests it is a simple automatic one. What we need is someone with a professional video camera, with control over aperture and whatever passes for 'speed' in such cameras, to repeat the experiment, using various combinations of settings. And then explain clearly how all this causes the 'rods' to appear!

Surely someone on this board has the equipment and skills...? :)


(And DO IT NOW, while bugs are in season!)
 
rynner said:
The pictures are good, but the accompanying 'explanation' is just ungrammatical blather!

True, enough...

Well, it is definitely shot with a camcorder that was made
within the last few years... it is 720 pixels by 480 pixels...
that is the digital cam aspect ratio (the older cams were
only 640 x 480 -- at least in my experience.)

The frame rate HAS to be 30 frames-per-second if shot in
the US (NTSC format) or 24 fps if shot in the UK (PAL format.)
All video cameras are stuck with these frame rates. (Except for
the new HD cams that George Lucas is using on Episode 3!)
Film cameras, however CAN shoot at different frame rates.

Since you can see the "blank" lines that alternate down the picture, you can tell that the person is capturing a "field"
(2 fields make up one frame -- the difference in each field is
what makes the "motion" smooth when you view a video
at the appropriate rate.) The one issue I have with this series
of "photos" (technically, still fields of video) is that very
often, those missing lines create a "jittery" type effect when viewed on a video monitor... could that have contributed to
the "rod" type effect?

I put the 5th photo into Photoshop and used the "deinterlace" filter... this is what I commonly use to get rid of this "jitter"
effect in freeze-frames of video. Many of the insects smoothed out, but a few retained the classic "peapod" shape.
(I'm not sure what the legal ramifications of posting someone elses photos are... otherwise, I'd attach it here!)

This makes me very confident that many rods are indeed
an insect/animal that is flying past the lens as the person
who shot this video "meant" to say. :)

TVgeek
 
....

Heh! :)

It's the illusion created by the trail of the wings rather than the rodlike body that got me believing that particular theory.
 
Quote: "Well if it was in UFO magazine, it must be true... "

He he, ufo magazine rules!
 
Roswell Rods jumped the shark

I visited Roswell rods a long time ago, it seemed pretty believable. The subject seemed to be presented in a "what you see is what happened" manner. Kind of subtle, then after reading the above posts and reinvigorating my interest in the subject I went again to the Roswell rods website. First picture was "Rods over Baghdad".

Bing Bing Bing went the BS detector in my head.

I'm not sure what those things are but the answer is not at Roswell rods. All previous pictures and video at that site are now junk as far as this skeptic is concerned.

I'm Really kind of pissed cause this to me was a fascinating concept, and I had a real belief that there was something unfolding. New Life, interdimentional micro timetraveling ships, silicon insects, future science, but Rods over Baghdad??

:headbutt:
 
Rods

About 2 weeks ago, I watched a documentary show on the Space Channel (Canada) that talked about Rods, those elongated objects that fly around at such high speeds that they are invisible to the naked eye, but can be caught on video.

I was intrigued by the different shapes and sizes, and the widespread locations in which they were found.

Nobody seemed to know, on the show, where they came from or why they are here, so the same night I asked my "spirit guides" that exact question. Their answer was these rods are extraterrestrial objects to gather information about the earth and its inhabitants. Seems like this is a much better way to get info. than by abducting humans/animals, or landing spacecraft to get samples, and being generally destructive.

Any comments?
 
Hate to be cynical about the whole thing, but they look EXACTLY like insects caught on film - digital cameras in particular can do strange things to objects in motion.
 
Re: Rods

Nobody seemed to know, on the show, where they came from or why they are here, so the same night I asked my "spirit guides" that exact question. .



Just a thought...these spirit guides, they don't come out of a bottle do they?
 
I was thining of something more liquid - hic!:_pished:
 
Rods

No, I think they mean spirits as in "liquid fire", not genies, am I correct? And, I drink alcoholic beverages very rarely.
 
-------------------------------------------------------
Has anyone caught this on a FILM camera versus just a
VIDEO camera? If not, my guess is that the undulating
look of the creature is just an "artifact" of a fast flying insect being caught across different fields of the video picture.
--------------------------------------------------------

My thoughts exactly, TVGeek. And a theory that should be relatively easy to test.
 
I haven't read this thread for a while, but I read this last page so I am going to be insolent and comment on just this. The video stills ( Gunther91 ) posted here.....Thankyou! This has bolstered my theory on these intrigueing yet "I think it's biased and bollocks, just like "Orbs" type opinion.
The stills show them for what they are.
Also, In FT, (Can't remember when or if it was on the Roswell rods site too), there was a pic of a waterfall thing with what was depicted as a "rod" flying (Or as I like to call it "Fannying about"!) out of it. Now, call me sceptical, but if anyone can gather that image for our perusal, I find it is just a f**king twig floating over the waterfall and showing up slightly horizontal as it does so.
Seems that, like the ghost pics and that on Ghostwatch, anything that resembles anything, is construed as it just to make their beliefs more concrete. WHich utterly makes me suspicious!

Sorry, I'm with Charles Darwin and "Our Lord Richard Dawkins " (And *Local Heroes hero...Adam Hart Davis*) on these themes.....WHich I find truly Fortean..........not in the believing 'cos it's way too odd that many people report it, but that it needs investigating without ignorance.
Arse.

*APologies...I am completely wazzed lol!*
 
Rods

Sorry if this has been on before but I'm new here.
Does anyone know of any updates on the phenomenon of extremely fast flying rods that were discovered when film footage was slowed down? I remember seeing a program about it on Discovery (I think) a while ago and it looked really interesting, especially all the different bits of film footage of the flying rods that they showed.
 
I remember having seen something on it in the past, but am not sure where it was discussed.

Are we talking beams of light, or dark rod-shaped masses moving at speed?
 
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