(I originally wrote this a few months ago but as I’ve seen another couple of similar instances recently and after a little prompting from another UFODigest contributor I thought I’d post it here at UFODigest.)
UFO ‘fleet’ Photographed in Annapolis, Maryland (March 19th 2010)
There has been a set of images doing the rounds lately that seem to be gathering some momentum. I was aware of these images when they were originally posted to Mufon Case Management System(CMS).
The images were captured on March 19th and submitted on March 24th , there were three images in total, the second and third images were original size and the first one was a cropped/zoomed image which showed blue translucent lights in the sky (LITS) the witness states he enhanced the dark areas on the images.
The CMS submission contained the following witness account:
UFO fleet of blue translucent discs over St. John’s College in Annapolis Maryland
I am a local photographer in Annapolis, Md. I was doing a night shoot on the practice fields of St. John’s College at 21:16:54 on 3/19/10. I was using a nikon D 700 with a 70-200 mm 2.8 professional lens mounted on a tripod. I didn’t open the files to edit the images until Sunday 3/21/10. When I enhanced the dark areas around the buildings on campus I noticed approximately 9 light blue orbs with a corona like halo around them. The orbs were positioned in front and back of the end of the roof line. This was image #1. Image # 2 revealed approximately 9 light blue translucent discs each with a bright light blue beacon on top. They appeared to be in a loose formation, banking to the right and departing the area. Image # 3 revealed the formation in the open night sky over Annapolis at a slightly higher altitude. The objects were now in the shape of a of a slightly flattened bell with a bright light blue beacon on top. Several of the objects had a slight maroon hue to them.
Unfortunately there is no way to link directly to the Mufon CMS report page containing the witness account & images and as I don’t want to leech their bandwidth if you wish to view/download them the full size images are easily retrieved via the search function which can be found on the tool bar to the left of the main page on the Mufon CMS page (here).
However *Mufon Of N.J.* website posted the account along with one of the full-sized images, both of which can be viewed here.
And to view the images at a more manageable size of 800px then use the following links:
- • 22466_submitter_file1__UFO1CloseCrop.jpg
- • 22466_submitter_file2__UFO2.jpg
- • 22466_submitter_file3__UFO3.jpg
Here are the three images on top of each other in chronological order (as pre-numbered & submitted):
They are of course massively reduced in size but it makes no difference to the point I wish to draw your attention to, namely how the angle of the camera changes (pans up) from one image to the next then you can clearly see that this causes the LITS to appear incrementally higher with each sequential image.
And now have another look at the following image which is the second of the set (submitted at original size) and which I’ve cropped:
Now have a look at the same image with guide-lines I’ve added from the lights on the ground to the LITS:
And the following image was the first one of the set (cropped by witness) again with guide-lines I’ve added:
Due to the obvious correlation between the two sets of lights (ground & sky) and the fact that all of the guide-lines I added intersect at a fixed point and are of an equal distance from the intersect leaves me in no doubt whatsoever that what we are looking at is lens flare caused by the fixed lighting which is located at the bottom of the images.
When multiple lens flares are present such as in these images the shape and size of the reflection depends on both the nature of the light source and the specifications of the camera which is used (curvature of the lens & type of aperture). And as in the above example both the light source and the flare are generally located on a line that crosses the centre of the photograph (between the light source and corresponding flare) as well as being located at an equal distance on either side of the centre (again which is evidenced above by where the multiple guide-lines intersect).