Photo Opportunity

A photographer friend and I headed out to a grassy hillside just before a huge storm was due. There were a couple of trees near the top of the hill, one of which had a little tree stand in it. There was only room for one person on the stand at a time, so we took turns climbing up the fifteen feet or so to the platform. From that vantage point we both took several pictures, as the rapidly changing light was creating some interesting and moody effects.

While my friend was up in the tree, she spotted something coming out of the clouds. It was heading behind her position, so she shouted down to me to go follow it. I was sitting at the base of the other tree, so grabbed my camera, which was almost out of battery power, and ran to the top of the hill. She was scrambling down out of the tree as fast as she could go, and I managed to crest the hill in time to get a couple of blurry shots of the back end of a huge craft. I could plainly see portholes and a pair of glowing red and blue inset lines about four feet thick that ran around the middle and back of the craft. The whole thing was a slightly elongated ellipsoid with a "bite" taken out of the aft of the disk. The air was highly distorted in the aft of the ship, as though by a heat shimmer.

My friend reached my side just as the ship slipped into the clouds. She managed to take a few shots. I played back the last few shots I had of the airship, and all of them were slightly blurry. "I swear, it didn't look that blurry in person, it was clear and sharp, except for the exhaust ports in the back."

"Maybe I got a better couple of shots, I wasn't prepared for it, though, so the exposure is probably too long." She had been shooting on film, so we'd have to wait to see her images. At least she'd seen the airship coming out of the clouds from the front. I was excited to get home and do some searching for images like ours.

I was sad that my shots hadn't been a little steadier, suggesting that I was right up there in the ranks of amateur UFO photographers. She said we might be able to fix the motion blur in software. Especially since I had her and the tree in the best photographs as reference points. Since I had moved between the shots, she suggested that we might even be able to make a stereogram out of them and have an idea of how far away the airship was.

Even though the craft was very different from any we'd ever seen, neither of us thought it was an alien craft, we were thinking it was a dirigible of some sort we'd never seen before, mostly because of how quiet it had been.