Breaking News From The Homestead: UFO Sighting
Breaking News. Are you numb to the phrase yet? It’s meant to capture your attention. Something that I need to know about is happening right now and I must immediately stop what I’m doing to find out what it is. If I turn the news on after not watching for weeks, it is exceedingly common for the “Breaking News” banner to be streaming to the exact same story that was being covered the last time that I tuned in. No breakthroughs. No new details. Literally, the exact same story. What a crock of shit!
That said, last night (May 4, 2023) at around 2125 EST, our night sky was illuminated by a chain of lights moving in unison roughly from west to east. They passed directly over our house. It seemed as if every animal in the area could sense the unusualness of the occurrence. Barking. Meowing. Howling. Hissing. And that was just my kids.
I had never seen anything like it before. Our youngest was convinced that we were about to live out the 2015 Adam Sandler movie Pixels. I must admit, the sight of the spectacle was not too far off from the graphics of the classic Atari games Centipede and Space Invaders. My wife thought that maybe Santa fell off the wagon again, and was out taking his sleigh for a joy ride in a drunken haze. The way that the cats were carrying on, I was nearly certain that we were about to be visited by maleficent ambassadors from the planet Melmac. RIP Gordon Shumway.
We watched until our visitors disappeared over the horizon. Check out this video that I was able to capture a snippet of our close encounter.
Imagine being a shepherd 2500 years ago, working quietly by your fire to prepare something to eat before settling in for the night. No light pollution. No noise pollution. Just raw nature. Now imagine having that video play out in real time before your eyes. Suddenly, the domesticated animals get distressed and agitated. The wild animals begin howling and growling. A chain of lights passes directly overhead and moves deliberately across the sky before disappearing into the distance. It would be mind blowing, wouldn’t it? You’d probably sacrifice an unblemished lamb immediately just to be on the safe side.
Today most people don’t sacrifice animals to God (or the gods). Instead, we sacrifice our time to Google, the master of the universe, in exchange for all manners of information (true, untrue and to be determined). A quick Google consult helped us figure out who our visitors were. All hail Google!
With a reasonable degree of certainty, what we believe that we saw was a Starlink satellite train. Elon Musk’s company Space X has launched thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit (LEO) since 2018. The stated purpose of these satellites is to provide internet access to remote areas. It has proved to be useful in Ukraine, where the infrastructure has been severely compromised to devastated. No poles. No cables. Internet access from space. LEO satellites orbit the earth at around 341 miles above the earth’s surface, while conventional satellite orbit is at 621 miles or more. Multiple other companies have satellites that occupy the LEO space and have plans to expand on that front. The implications for the future are unknown, but it isn’t at all difficult to come up with a list of concerns stemming from the space clutter generated. (reference: Starlink: Why is Elon Musk launching thousands of satellites? from BBC news Aug 2, 2022)
I guess we dodged the bullet this time, but you can be damn sure that we’ll be watching and waiting for our next celestial visitation.
