Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

It’s full of falling stars! But wait a minute. There are even more videos from this same user. Does he waste every night looking at the sky? Does he goes through hundreds of hours of videos searching for meteors? Is this a hoax?

No, he just uses a fantastic piece of software that automates mostly everything: the UFOCaptureV2! It’s joined by the UFOAnalyzer and the UFOOrbit. The whole package automates the process of detecting unusual phenomena in the sky, and even attempts to automatically classify and analyze it.

Check the samples of videos captured by the software: meteors, birds et al and, what I was quite skeptical when I first saw it, even sprites, elves and jets! Of course, it wouldn’t be worth its name if it didn’t also capture UFOs.

The software is free for use for 30 days, and the price is more than worth it, as the developer actively adds features and corrects bugs, being also available in support forums. For less than U$5,000 one would be able to set up a system, and that’s from scratch: the most expensive parts would be the high-sensitivity night camera and associated optics, and the dedicated PC.

I’m completely flabbergasted and excited by this piece of software and its results. This may look like a paid advertising post, but it’s in fact simple candid enthusiasm.

You see, it took science, and those brave real scientists, a lot of effort to even prove and accept that meteors exist – rocks do fall from the sky. Then, sprites, elves and jets were only confirmed scientifically – by accident – less than twenty years ago. It involved special research equipment and even the the Space Shuttle. This is really new, advanced stuff.

But now, you can confirm the existence of these phenomena literally at the comfort of your own home, giving a new meaning to armchair research. Check unusual sky phenomena just like you would check your email.

The resulting data will also make robust physical evidence, as the setup automatically records time, you wouldn’t be changing places much often, and it even automatically tries to estimate various data such as angular sizes from a built in star map system. If several people aim at the same area of the sky, it would make amazing physical evidence. Just like the Japanese are already doing to track meteors, lightning and all.

I’m really excited about it, and plan to promote and setup a system here in Brazil, a hotspot for lightnings and, local ufologists claim, UFOs.

Not convinced yet? Take a look at this (and the video). Did you know meteors could do that? More images and videos can be seen here.

There’s more UFO software suggested by the French folks of RR0, and my personal discovery of this gem came yesterday thanks to Odin from Ufofu.

Uranibio

Amazing series of works by Brazilian artist Alexandre Jorge. And made with… papier maché!Click for more.

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A penguin. Atop a pine tree. Or, if you prefer, el pingüino en un pino. Ta-dah!

Jaime Maussán, this courageous UFO and paranormal investigator in Mexico, and another piece of the unexplained conundrum of the mysterious world of the enigmas.

The father of the respected witness even saw the penguin fly afterwards. Wow!

Incidentally, another brave Mexican paranormal investigator, and friends with Maussán, is called Santiago Yturria Garza. That’s Spanish for heron. Maussán? Well, that’s Spanish for what Penn & Teller call their show.

This last Sunday, a Boeing 757 from Northwest Airlines going from Detroit to Tampa, apparently collided with an unknown object in mid-air. The damage to the nose cone can be seen in the image above, click for the news and video.

Though initially believed to be caused by an unfortunate bird, the aircraft was flying at 18,000 feet when the pilots heard a loud bang before the weather radar, inside the nose cone, went dead. That’s above the height birds usually fly.

Other possibilities mentioned go from structural failure to a lightning hit. The FAA is analyzing the nose cone, and the case echoes the more bizarre event of the Romanian fighter jet that hit unidentified objects at great height.

And in yet another case, another aircraft reports a near-collision with what looked like a small rocket in Houston, at over 5,000 feet. The near accident happened this last Memorial Day.

Invasion? UAVs? Viral marketing for the remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still”?

Seriously, it’s not even clear the incident over Florida was a collision, and the one over Houston definitely wasn’t one. As for the Romanian case, that remains an unexplained one.

[via CoW/VJ Ballester Olmos]

UPDATE: Friend José Américo suggested a news item  which in turn pointed to another news of a nearly identical case.

In Janurary another Boeing 757 going from Newark and at 10,000 feet was hit by lightning, to the despair of the crew and passengers. They saw the flash of light, even smelled something burned.

Fortunately nothing much worse than that happened, but when they landed, they noted a somewhat familiar damage:

Let us wait for the FAA conclusions on the Florida case, but if I had to bet… now would be much easier to do so.

In another news item, we are informed that a “US company claims it is ready to build a microwave ray gun able to beam sounds directly into people’s heads”.

The US military has been playing already with directed acoustic weapons, along with electromagnetic radiation weapons. But this new one would come full circle on the long and bizarre relation between paranoid madness, the strange and the very, very real.

One of the first detailed clinical descriptions of madness was the one of James Tilly Matthews delusions with an influencing machine. The poor fellow believed a sinister gang controlled his mind with an “Air Loom”. Mike Jay wrote in detail about the case, and it’s more than worth reading. Besides the peculiar craziness of Matthews, there’s the twist that he probably was, afterall, victim of a conspiracy. Just because he was paranoid it didn’t mean they weren’t after him.

Paranoia is widespread in ufology in particular, and some claim it was seminal in the first years of the controversy, as the Shaver Mystery flourished in the (crazy) people’s minds. That doesn’t mean every UFO buff is crazy and foaming, but as they say, the truth is out there, trust no one. The theme of aliens and/or the government controlling people’s minds, either with disinformation or more directly, with implants and abductions, is pervasive.

But let’s go back to the electromagnetic guns beaming sounds, and on to the title of this post. For years some observers have noted that in rare occasions it was possible to hear meteors. And not because they were coming over their heads, but at a distance, at the same time they were seen very high in the sky. That’s outrageously absurd – just like lightning and thunder, there should be a significant delay between sight and sound. So those observers usually kept those crazy things to themselves.

The only thing is, this phenomenon has been recorded, and there’s a proposed physical explanation for it. It involves meteors emitting low frequency electromagnetic waves that are transduced into sound near the observers by things like glasses or, possibly… tin foil! Oh, the irony. By the way, that’s similar, though not identical, to the proposed way that new weapon would work.

If it all sounds crazy still, there’s a NASA webpage on the subject. Fort would love this.