Our Very Own UFO Pic?

So on a recent glorious April morning I found myself on my buddy Rick’s clam boat, out on the Sound just south of Milford and East of Charles Island. Because it was a clear day and the rising sun was providing spectacular color and light, I snapped a ton of photos.

I went through the majority of them right away, picking out all the best ones of the crew and the boat. About two weeks ago, I was going through the rest to dump them (yay digital photography!) when I came across one that wasn’t of the crew, but of the sunrise. I thought it might make a nice background for my computer, but I noticed it had a few marks on it — must’ve been a water spot on the lens, right? So I opened the file in Photoshop to clean it up, but when I looked at it closer, one of the marks didn’t look like any water spot I’d ever seen. As a matter of fact, as I zoomed in on it, it looked like an object which appeared to be floating in the clouds. It also didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before … to me, it looked like a well, an unidentified object … flying …

click to embiggen

I don’t remember seeing anything in the sky when we were out on the boat, and something of that size certainly would’ve been noticed by the crew, right? It’s size and shape reminded me a of a smokestack, but there were no factories in that direction (a few hundred feet in the air over a large body of water), and it couldn’t have been a double exposure because I was shooting digital. Hmm …

Here’s an even larger version of the picture for you to peruse — unfortunately, we’re limited on how big an image we can upload to the site — my original image is twice as large as this.

click to embiggen even more!

What the heck, right? I mean, it looks like some sort of giant cylindrical object floating right up there in the clouds, doesn’t it? I’m sort of skeptical at heart, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought it was just weird …

And I also laughed at the irony of the situation — here’s someone who runs a website dedicated to weird and unusual things in Connecticut and coincidentally, he gets a UFO picture? Yeah, right. Still, it looked odd, and I thought it might merit a look by someone who is more skilled in analyzing these kinds of things.

Well now that I have these type of connections, I sent the original full-sized image to our friend Marc D’Antonio of MUFON, whose expertise is in image analysis. While I waited for Marc’s analysis, I did a little research of my own, and came across this picture and story about a similar object recently seen in the skies over Great Britain.

Of course, the video of this object is shaky at best, and those analyzing it suggest it was a weather balloon. I supposed the object in my photo could’ve been a weather balloon, but out there in the Sound on a cloudless day, it would’ve been obvious, right? When I took the photo, I know I didn’t see anything unusual in the sky, and no one on the boat noted anything odd either.

Luckily, before I could get my knickers in a full twist, I got a response back from Marc —

I looked at the image. The first thing I can say without a doubt is that this artifact is close to the camera if not in the camera. You can see this by zooming in actually. It does not exhibit the same characteristics if the sky behind it or the water below. Its sharpness and refined edges indicate that as a close object it is probably something on the lens or the optically clear covering in front of the lens more likely . It can be very tiny on the lens and be larger on the photo. This is one of those things you dont see until later when you look at the image. That is usually an indicator that it was not really there. In this case, such an object would have definitely caught your attention had it appeared as you see it in this image.

Based on the lighting of it in fact, it looks like it might be a scratch on the clear glass over the lens. The reason is the way its illuminated. If you noticed, the bright ‘sunlit’ side of the vertical object is on the opposite side of the object from the Sun. This says that for this to be illuminated in this way with the darker part of the object TOWARD the Sun side, and the brighter part toward the opposite side of the Sun, that its a RECESSED artifact, which can be likened to a little ‘valley’ on the lens aperture, or… a scratch. If it was a raised piece of debris on the lens, you would see the lit side of the artifact on the same side as the Sun.

So in my view, check out your lens’ optically clear cover on the Powershot camera you have and see if you can see that scratch. Just my thoughts!

So, no UFO. But a nice lesson demonstrating how easy it is to accidentally capture something “unexplained.”

Maybe next time!