All too often when we see a UFO video posted to YouTube, there are “issues”. Either the clip is too short and barely shows the UFO, there is no wide shot to give us a frame of reference or any number of other factors that make the video worthless as evidence of the UFO phenomena. This is not the case with this series of video posted by YouTube user PSYLEOEIGHT. All total we have nearly 27 minutes of footage showing a group of UFO orbs in the skies above Merced, California on the morning of September 24, 2007. Other than being a prime example of shaky-cam and one other issue that I will discuss later, this is incredible footage. Of the three clips, I find the first the most interesting since the orbs/UFOs appear to be flying in triangle-shaped clusters of 3. While it may be an optical illusion, they appear to remain at a fixed distance from each other. This would seem to indicate that what we are seeing is not a series of balloons released into the sky (which one might be led to believe from the other two videos).

This brings us to the one issue I do have with the videos. All three videos have the unmistakable green tint of a camcorder’s IR/night vision mode, however in the description of the second video the witness claims the sighting occurred between 10 and 11 AM. This would have been in broad daylight. Why would he have needed to shoot in IR mode? The skeptic in me wants to say that it is to make something identifiable and ordinary look out of this world. Meanwhile, the believer in me wants to give the witness the benefit of the doubt and say that either the AM is a typo or that the camera had been permanently converted for IR filming. I have reached out to PSYLEOEIGHT to find out and will post his answer if he replies.

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A statue commemorating the first Mothman
sighting near Point Pleasant, WV

photo by Fokket

Quite possibly one of the worlds best know cryptids, the Mothman has been seen on and off across the United States for the past 40 plus years. Just recently a witness came forward and contacted About.com’s Paranormal Phenomena Guide Stephen Wagner with the details of an encounter near the Ft. Worth suburb of Mansfield, Texas.

In the fall of 2007 the witness was driving with her daughter along FM 157 between Mansfield and Venus, Texas around dusk when something caught her eye. At first she thought she was seeing a plastic bag caught in the wind, but as the object neared she saw it was no bag. It appeared to have a “human-like form with wings attached”. The witness reported the creature made no noise as it glided towards her car. Filled with fear she instinctively rolled up her window. When her daughter didn’t say anything, the witness began to think she was seeing things. Finally after driving a few miles she asked her daughter if she had seen the creature. The daughter replied that she had. They then sheepishly opened the inside cover of the sun roof to see if the creature, which had disappeared from sight, had landed on the roof, which luckily it had not.

Mothman in Texas