I Saw 2 UFOs over New York City. Two separate times and two different objects, from my window facing Manhattan’s Upper East Side, across the East River. Both in plain view, one red, one green. But that’s really not the story.
By David Stone
Assorted ideas, Large & Small
UFO Start notes…
I live in New York, the largest city in the United States.
My windows open up to a classic view of the Upper East Side skyline. We’ve witnessed emergency rescue operations, aquatic parades, historic sailing vessels and countless sightseeing tours and skidoos.
We’ve also seen UFOs. Not once, but twice.
Photo: Skyline Mirror by Deborah Julian
I don’t know what they were or what their business was, but if either aircraft was of extraterrestrial origin — as many might suggest — it’d be a single gesture away from the most historic event ever to take place on our — universally speaking — unexceptional planet.
A real oddity: both objects were not at all obscure like the faint, distant things in the sky you get from UFO news reports. Both were nearby and clearly defined. It’s weird…
But nobody else seems to have seen the objects we saw. That makes it a story.
I Saw 2 UFOs: Sighting #1:
Whatever brought me to the window is forgotten — maybe just the view — but when I looked down toward the river, roughly around the 70th Street level in Manhattan, a red cylindrical object rose from the water’s surface. This was well after dark.
Can’t say the object came out of the river, but at first, it was just above the murky surface.
It was nighttime, and the bright, true red cutting against the blackened river caught my eye. The craft was, maybe, six feet high, translucent and bulging in the middle, sort of like a spinning top.
Except it wasn’t spinning. It wasn’t making any noise either, at least none heard above the routine New York City background roar.
It’s flight was slow enough that I had time to call my wife over from the kitchen to watch the UFO with me until it disappeared, growing smaller and smaller, going mostly straight up, slightly north, into the heavens.
I expected helicopters, maybe Air Force jets, sirens, whatever scrambles when UFOs appear. But when there was nothing, I watched for news stories.
Any news stories…
Nothing.
Was it possible that no one else saw this object?
Recently caught on film…
I Saw 2 UFOs: Sighting #2:
In our next apartment, also featuring a great view of the skyline and traffic straight up 79th Street into Central Park, I was standing at the window again when another unidentified flying object — green, this time — came turning across Manhattan from the direction of New Jersey.
Its shape was odder than the first UFO. Arms extended from a small center and cut at right angles about halfway out. It was too far away to estimate size, but it sure as hell didn’t resemble any man made aircraft.
And it turned, like the extended arms were crawling it through the sky.
Nice pleasant shade of green. You couldn’t miss it.
Yet, from what I can tell, somewhere around 10,000,000 other people did.
What’s Wrong? Why Don’t More People See UFOs?
Let’s be clear.
There are myriad explanations for what these unidentified flying objects were.
The term — UFO — is routinely misconstrued to mean they’re, by definition, from somewhere other than Earth. But we should take the phrase literally. They’re unidentified, and they’re flying. That’s all, until we find out more.
When sightings are made public, there’s a rush in contrasting directions. One latches onto them as sure signs of aliens among us, the other insisting explanations, from weather balloons to experimental aircraft, are readily available.
With neither side offering much flexibility, any real conversation gets lost.
Just what we need, another polarizing topic in public life.
And I’d bet a lot of people who see things like that don’t speak up. Who needs the hassle?
Some don’t want to be ridiculed as “kooks” who “see things.”
We’ve got this problem
The problem should be obvious. If we’re being visited by aliens, that’s the biggest news in all of history.
Aliens technologically advanced enough — or just differently evolved perceptually enough — must have game-changing science we don’t… about time travel, about the origins of the universe, about life, death and disease, and much more.
They might also be inclined to do what we humans have always done when encountering cultures we deem inferior. That is, we kill them.
We’ve done it so many times to so many other cultures and tribes — you can include other animal species as well — we ought to acknowledge that a dose of our own medicine is possible.
Who wouldn’t want to know about all of that? Who wouldn’t want to be prepared?
Wouldn’t you like to know why they’re here? Where they came from? How they pulled it off?
Realistically, with an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe, the likelihood of ours being the only planet on which life forms arose is too remote to calculate. To this perspective, consider that in our Milky Way galaxy alone, there are an estimated 30 billion other planets.
Can it all be just a big wasteland, present company excepted?
So, maybe, they’re not all kooks after all.
A Hitch In The Human Software
Although few would admit or even be aware, we operate day to day with a large system error in our cerebral processor. It’s known as cognitive bias.
In plain English, it means we see what we expect or want to see and discard everything else. You can read about a couple of examples in a Psychology Today article, but I’ll share my favorite story here.
Observers are asked to watch two teams, one dressed in black, the other in white. They’re told to count how many times the white team passes the ball and ignore the others. While the balls are passing, a person in a gorilla costume walks in and pounds his chest, then walks away. In study after study, most observers never see the gorilla, even though eyeball tracking devices record them looking right at it.
So, it’s been confirmed that we regularly miss obvious things that appear right before us. That may be the major reason why not only do we not report UFOs but we don’t “see” them at all.
All of reality happens inside our minds with quite a lot of filtering discretion on our parts, and we may have, for any number of reasons, from fear to fear of ridicule, chosen to leave UFOs invisible.
But that doesn’t make UFOs of any kind and with any intent go away. They’re still there — if they’re there at all, and we need to start looking. And admit we’re looking.
Some pretty important things may be missed. Maybe not, but with all there is at stake, wouldn’t it always be better to know than not know?
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The steam plant and the steam tunnel were never two problems. They were one system. They were only separated later, when separating them made development easier and responsibility harder to pin down.
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