If Curiousident did have a camera with him or her on that date we would have something to analyse. I am fairly sure that with a video to look at
a/ we could come up with some plausible explanations for this event and
b/ it wouldn't look much like the way Curiousident remembers it.
Videos that are not fakes can be analysed in some depth nowadays, as the people at Metabunk are demonstrating.
You know the saddest thing is that today I (and all of us really) take video very much for granted. Even the more basic of smartphones can record video. You see something, you get your phone out, you capture something.
For those interested in the account which eburacum is referring to, you can find that here:
http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/ufo-sighting-warwickshire-october-1996.63860/
I've not posted it into this thread before.
And yes, I wish I had a photo or camera footage to show you. I don't. Because, like I say, we're talking about pre-digital here. Cameras which still needed physical film. Camcorders which still needed charging and inserting video tape into. Items which you would need to prepare in advance of expecting to see something.
I certainly was expecting to see something.
Nor was my father, or my mother and younger brother.
In 1996 it was still a couple of years before I owned by crappy old 2G Nokia 5110 - my first mobile phone, period. And a decade before my owning a phone capable of taking photos or recording video.
In '96 even camcorders were a luxury which few people afforded. We certainly didn't own one. The first time I got my hands on a video camera was at uni in '98. Though even if we had had access to one the likelihood of capturing anything truly visible on a home use camcorder, at the kind of distance I'm talking for when we got back home, it would have been a tiny dot on the horizon. Almost impossible to make any real conclusion on.
I mean sure while my father and I were still in town, trying to get closer to wherever this thing was hovering, that would of given us a much better image. But, you know, who the hell carried a bulky camcorder in their car just in case they spotted something unusual, which they hadn't been expecting to see...?
Sorry if I'm sounding a little dismissive here, but your post does come across as a little bit condescending. I certainly don't consider myself to be a believer in alien visitors or flying saucers. I shared an account of this odd sighting of something in the sky (and indeed elsewhere on these boards), submitted As Is. I don't claim to have an answer for it.
I
don't know what the shape in the sky actually was. I have definite doubts (largely based on it speed of travel and it's flying at night with no obvious logo) that it could have been an advertising blimp. But I don't believe it was some kind of bizarre alien exploration craft. I do live in an area where military aircraft do fly overhead from time to time. So some kind of craft or dirigible
they were testing or using is not implausible.
I just look at it quite literally as a Unidentified Flying Object. In as much as it was airborne and I could not readily identify it as an object which would/should normally be there.
As to any claim that I am in some way remembering the visual detail of said object incorrectly, I would point out that by day I am actually employed
for my attention to detail. The heady (sometimes tedious) world of Quality Assurance, in which I send my days reporting anything from rogue unlicensed logos in images to to the exact circumstances of reproducing a problem with a view to getting it resolved.
I am not prone to hyperbole or exaggeration. And while we
are talking about an experience from over 20 years ago now, it is something which has stuck in my head pretty distinctively ever since.
