UFO SIGHTING

Possible UFO sighted over Angel Fire, NM on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008 Click image for larger Image (384 KB .jpg)

Sighting date: 10/07/2008
Sighting time: 12:00 pm MST
63-year-old female
Name: Janet Sailor
Full-time Angel Fire, New Mexico resident

I was near the end of shooting about 300 photos of local autumn scenery and stopped at a friend's house to shoot the panoramic view of the Moreno Valley I knew could be seen from his main deck. While returning to my car, I noticed a flower pot on another small deck which juts out from the living room of his house about 12-15 feet above the driveway. The flowers hanging over the pot looked pretty against the bright blue cloudless sky, so I shot four pictures in a row of them, from about 20 feet away, using a telephoto lens. (The first shot was a "single;" the next three were a "burst.") The shots were aimed up toward the sky, slightly north, but mostly to the west. If there was any wind, I didn't notice it.

Enhanced view of possible UFO seen over Angel Fire, NM on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008 Click image for Larger Image (24 KB .jpg)

I noticed the object in photo one (of the four I shot of that scene) when quickly scanning through the photos as I transferred them from my camera to my computer. Since I hadn't noticed anything in the sky when I shot the photo, I thought maybe the "object" resulted from a "glitch" in the camera. I made a copy of the photo at full size and enlarged it in Photoshop, then enlarged the section with the object in it again and "enhanced" it using the Photoshop Unsharp Mask filter at the following settings: Amount-500; Radius-25; Threshold-15. In the enlarged enhanced view, the object appeared to be solid, and not the result of a camera malfunction. I checked and rechecked the other three photos of the same scene and found no trace of the object in any of them.

I mentally retraced my activities to determine the time when I shot the photo and then did test shots with the same camera to determine the amount of time which elapsed between the first and last photos in the scene (five seconds).

Camera: Fuji S100, 12 megapixels. Setting for all four photos: automatic. I have saved all four original photos.

UPDATE: October 15, 2008

Assistant state MUFON director Miller Johnson has forwarded photo of the unidentified object photographed in Angel Fire October 7, 2008 to famed optical physicist Bruce Maccabee. Maccabee, who holds a PhD in physics, has been active in UFO research since the late 1960s through the National Investigatiions Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and the Mututal UFO Network (MUFON). He was instrumental in establishing the Fund For UFO Research (FUFOR), served as FUFOR chairman for more than a dozen years and currently serves on its national board.

Macabee has amassed an impressive list of research and investigation credentials and was the first to obtain the secret "flying disc file" of the FBI (what he calls "the REAL X-Files).

In the meanwhile, UFO researcher Dennis Balthaser recommended the photo be forwarded to Peter Davenport, director at the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). Davenport has been director of NUFORC since 1994. He reports sighting cases regularly on the Jeff Rense Radio Show and presents lectures on specific UFO cases, most notably the Phoenix Lights sighting.

Stay tuned to ASPE News for opinions from these experts (see photo and sighting report at www.aspefiles.org/aspe_files.php).

MOVING OBJECTS

Sighting date: 09/20/2007 or 09/21/2007
Sighting time: 8:00 pm MST
66-year-old male
Graduate degree in physics
Employed 35 years with major industrial company
Part-time Angel Fire, New Mexico resident

Location Description:
My friend [name deleted], visiting from Florida and I were setting up my Meade LXR 200 10" Schmidt- Cassegrain telescope on my deck at 10,000 ft elevation on Angel Fire Mountain. My wife and [my friend's wife] were 15 ft away in the living room.

We were adjusting the telescope and facing south. As the sun moved lower behind Wheeler Peak, a bright stationary light caught our attention. It was located roughly at a right ascension of 18H 55.5M and declination of -16 degrees 22.6M near the top of the constellation Sagittarius. Jupiter was not yet visible. Venus at its brightest has a magnitude of -4.2. This object had a brightness approx 50% greater -6 to -7. We observed the motionless white light for one to two minutes to exhibit no color variations or oscillation in intensity. The light was slightly oval in shape with the axis vertically oriented. It appeared to be 5 to 6 times the size of Jupiter. We could not gauge the distance of the light away from the house, but it appeared to be 20-30 miles away in the direction of Las Vegas. I turned to my laptop in an effort to identify what it could be. We called to our wives who came out and saw the object as well. Suddenly it shot off in the direction of the Eagle Nebula and disappeared within 2-3 seconds. I have never before or since observed such a strange phenomenon. After dark, Jupiter was visible at a magnitude of -2.6.

If readers of this report have a confirmation of this sighting or any explanation of this observation, we would welcome all comments. Please contact Bill at info@aspefiles.org.

MOVING OBJECTS

Sighting date: 07/01/1996 (approximate date)
Sighting time: 6:30 pm (approximate time)
51-year-old female (age at sighting date)
Business owner
Full-time Angel Fire, New Mexico resident

Location Description:
Second floor balcony of Benchmark Condo in Angel Fire, New Mexico facing mountain immediately south (less than 100 feet), mountain to the east less than one mile away and mountains to the west about two miles away. Condo altitude about 8700 feet. Altitude of mountain to east about 10,500 feet. Altitude of mountains to west 10,000-11,000 feet. No view north from balcony.

The eastern sky was nearly black with clouds from a rainstorm which had just passed by, traveling west to east. The western sky was bright with a sun low in the sky. The air was clear, but with humidity left over from the just-passed-by rainstorm.

I was explaining to two neighborhood children (ages about four and six) that the best time to look for rainbows was immediately after a storm, when the sky was still dark with clouds and rain to the west and the sun was shining from the east, because the sunlight would refract through the moisture in the air. As I was explaining, I raised my arm and drew an arc in the air from west to east with my hand. As my hand went directly overhead, I noticed a stationary shape in the air just above the mountainside directly in front of me. My hand completed the arc before I realized the shape was something I didn't recognize.

I immediately looked back above my head again and saw a large triangle with round lights on the underside of each of the triangle points. The triangle immediately began to recede upwards, and then disappeared south over the mountain in the blink of an eye.

I have no idea how large the object was. I saw it for only an instant before it began to recede. My impression was that it was very, very big! I noted that it was just below the top of the mountain -- since I could see trees behind the hindmost point of the triangle. Time elapsed during the entire sighting was (at most) four seconds.