Cigar-shaped

It is often commented that with smart phones so common these days, there ought to be a wealth of photos of anomalous phenomena. But it’s not enough to have a camera, one also needs the presence of mind to use it. A while ago I was sitting in my study late one afternoon when I saw something quite curious in the distance. It appeared to be a glowing cigarshaped object moving slowly from right to left across the sky. Of course, I should have grabbed a camera and captured what would have been a wonderful bit of UFO footage, and as I describe it here, it sounds like a classic UFO observation. That I didn’t was partly due to not thinking of it until too late, and partly due to the fact that I knew exactly what it was. It was actually a passenger aircraft flying almost directly away from me. Because of the angle of its flight, its contrail was extremely foreshortened so that it looked cigar-shaped. One is used to seeing contrails from the side, not end-on. And it was glowing because it was lit up by the rays of the setting sun. I knew that this is what it was, because I had seen the same plane fly over my house a minute or two previously. But without that knowledge, if I had managed to film it, I think people would think it was a very clear UFO encounter.

Roger Musson

Edinburgh