Newsgroups: alt.ufo.reports
From: kymhorsell@gmail.com
Subject: jellyfish ufos (1/2)

[uploaded 48 times; last 25/10/2024]

Let me let you in on a little secret.

I was gardening one sunny day before the Pandemic and got up to
stretch after a bout of weeding around the roses and there -- hanging
in the W sky around 45 deg above the horizon -- was an odd looking object. 
At first I thought it might be a large grayish plastic bag
that had somehow been blown way up into the air and for reasons
unknown had just decided to hang motionless up there.

I watched it for 2-3 mins and it didn't seem to move. From my rough
measurements it had visual diam around ~4 deg. But it was -- as usual
with these things -- hard to judge how far it was away.  The sky was 
cloudless blue. The "bag" wasn't even fluttering. It could have been 1 ft 
across or 100.

My eyesight these days is not the best -- after a couple bouts of chemo a
few years back I was declared legally blind and things haven't gotten
better from there -- but I could make out some darker irregular internal
structures in the "bag". If it was a garbage bag then someone forgot to 
empty it before it got up into the sky.

After watching it a while more, and it still not moving at all, I got a bit
bored and went back to the weeding. 5-10 mins after that I looked
up again and it was gone.

I recalled that maybe 1 year before this incident I had seen another
grey garbage bag up in (by coincidence?) the same area of the sky. 
But that one had really looked and acted like a garbage bag. On a day 
that was a bit grayish and windy at ground level, that time the bag was 
wayyy up in the sky -- maybe 1 deg in apparent diam -- and was obviously 
being blown around. But now I come to think of it, it had managed to stay
reasonably close to the same spot in the sky and just seemed to be doing
"cartwheels" up there. After a min or 2 I lost interest and had gone
onto other things and didn't look for it again.

I didn't think much more about either plastic bag until another
incident happened maybe 6m later (we're up to mid 2019). Third time
was the charm. That time I think I was just hanging out under the
awning on the patio having a cup of joe, looking out over the small
part of the world visible to the N.  Then something came into view
roughly over my left shoulder (SW).  It was like nothing I've ever
seen or heard of before. I tried to google it up. Nothing. What it
looked like was odd enough. But what is was doing was just crazy.
Either/or it was an unusual thing.

Visibly it looked like 2 elongated teardrops joined point to point.
Like a horizontal infinity sign with an aspect ratio around 4 to 1.
It was flying at apparently constant speed and constant height, the
speed of a small plane at fairly low altitude. But, us usual, hard to
judge how high it was. There was some fluffy white and dark clouds off
to my NW. Maybe at most it was about 1/2 way between that and me. 
If the shape of the thing and the sheen and the occasional shimmer
that showed it wasn't a rigid skin were not enough, it was in a slow
constant rate flat spin about the center. It was like the whole thing
was some kind of hellicopter. Except as it rotated you could see it
had a round cross section and not anything that could reasonably
produce lift.

Upto ~10 deg wide when I first saw it, if it was 1/2 way between me
and the clouds over to the NW it could have been 50-70m along its long axis.  
A bit large for e.g. a broken weather balloon.

But how/why the H*ll was it turning? It turned around it's center every
approx 10 sec. There was the low grey cloud some distance off to my 10
o'clock, but as the thing flew horiz and turned it briefly caught the
sun every couple rotations somewhere nr the middle of the "infinity".
The glints were copper colored.

The thing proceeded leisurely at constant speed, constant height,
constant rotation in roughly a northerly direction until it
disappeared from view over 2m high fences, buildings -- homes and
barns and whatnot -- toward my north.

These incidents re-ignited a childhood interest in the non-mundane.

Which is why I started gathering some numbers and seeing what could be
extracted from same.

At about that time anyway, someone I knew from academia sent me an
academic paper on warp drive they were working on. And in between
large grabs of esoteric math related to solving GR field equations in
strong EM fields the paper mentioned the Nimitz tictac biz from a few
years earlier.

While individual reports might be mistake or hoaxes, it's much much
harder for a group of witnesses to see things that form a consistent
pattern or strong relationship with other things in the wider world
they should not have been able to appreciate.  Like the weather on a
given day in the middle of a remote continent or water temperatures in
the depths of the Atlantic.

In my case I only have a handful of one-off events. So fat chance they
can be analyzed by themselves at all.

But the phenomenon of "sky jellyfish", which seemed to be about the
only thing that was even vaguely similar, is another apparently
growing thing and we can look at that.

There are lots of explanations from hard scientists that write the
phenomena off entirely as sunlight reflecting off rocket exhaust or
clouds, or various other "swamp gas" type explanations.  Sure. It
could be anything. It could be a combination of broken weather
balloons or wind-blown shopping bags. But in a few years of looking
fairly carefully at the world it's hard to believe mundane things can
behave the way 2 of the objects I saw did.

But no matter. Let's just "go to the tape" and see whether there are
patterns in what other people have reported related to objects that
look like jellyfish wandering around the skies of mostly N Am.

The year-by-year list of reports that mention "jelly" in the NUFORC data
looks like:

Year	#sky jellyfish
1972         1  
2003         1  
2005         1  
2006         3  
2007         4  
2008         4  
2009         5  
2010         6  	<-- max
2011         4  
2012         5  
2013         4  
2014         3  
2015         1  
2017         1  
2018         4  
2019         1  
2020         5  


As with some of similar data we might ask ourselves how we can
possibly make anything out of such a small, scrappy set of numbers.

But we can, of course. We just have to be careful. Or try to be careful. :)

We can run a set of careful statistical tests to see what variables
out there in the world seem to closely predict the appearance of these
particular sightings. I.e. what other things happened in the same
month, prev month, prev season, last year that seem to predict the
number of jellyfish sightings in a given month.

The AI s/w I am using & developing mostly is oriented to trying to
compare things against natural phenomena like the month-by-month
average temperature in remote locations, areas of sea ice in the
Arctic, or the depth of snow at Vostok at the S Pole. It has a
database of literally 1000s of such things that it updated and expands
day by day and can notionally (since it uses experience it has
previously gained, it sometimes "guesstimates" what variables are
likely to relate to a given target without actually measuring whether
they do or not) go through the list and spit out a bunch of things
that closely correlate with the list of data series and give a rough
idea what explains that phenomena of interest and what kind of
probability each explanation has of being what you might be looking for. 
It gives its "expert opinion" of what the thing you're looking at
might be.

Throwing the jellyfish data above to the AI s/w produces a list of
likely related weather and other data that relate. And it's an
interesting list.

--
["We didnt want to cause mass panic":]
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