Thursday, July 15, 2010

Colombia: UFO Over Belén

Source: El Colombiano
Date: 07-10-10


Colombia: A UFO Over Belén
By Juliana Uribe and Jaime Alberto Villegas Echeverri

Jaime Villegas was closing down his business for the night at Belen Altavista around 8:45 p.m. last Sunday when red and orange lights in the sky drew his attention. A block away from the store, he came across a group of people who, looking upward, wondered about the true nature of the strange object hovering over Loma de los Bernal.

Mr. Villegas ran back to the store, grabbed a camera, and tried to capture the phenomenon that had everyone open-mouthed and breaking out in goose pimples.

The unidentified flying object remained in place for half an hour. Natalia Villegas, a cousin of Jaime who lives at Loma de los Bernal, remarked subsequently that the lights were hovering over her building, “casting a great deal of light but making no sound at all.”

The twenty people who were gripped by their curiosity – including Jaime – remained until the UFO began to move, and vanished into the night.

Villegas returned home and with his photos, tried to find something on the Internet that resembled [the object] and found a You Tube video that coincided with the characteristics of the object recorded by the camera: images of another UFO seen on June 20th of last year over the city.

A Possible Explanation?

German Fredy Marulanda, head of air traffic control for Aeronautica Civil, explains that “in many instances, the speed and altitude of flights create optical effects that may confuse people on the ground, who view them in a distorted manner. Add to this the fact that the night causes a loss of depth of field. Therefore, distances do not match what the eye is seeing.”

Comments from Readers

“Alleged manifestations of the UFO phenomenon have become frequent over our territory. The majority of explanations offered by aeronautical authorities speak of optical illusions, but this is a worldwide phenomenon, manifestations having different sizes and shapes. The lead us to believe that we are not alone. Here’s an image I took over Barrio Manrique in previous days, and what’s interesting is that the image shows something that remained static for about an hour and half. I would not care to speculate if it was an object or optical illusion, but we must be certain that anything is possible in such a dynamic and unforeseeable universe.” – Juan Carlos Giraldo.

(Translation (c) 2010, S. Corrales, IHU)