northernstar - Marybourough's UFO phenomenon remains unsolved after government authorities and weather experts yesterday failed to explain strange orange lights sighted by hundreds of residents during the past week.
The Chronicle was bombarded with phone calls, emails and visitors all day yesterday after publishing a story on the hovering objects, which appeared in the night sky above the city last Thursday, Friday, Saturday and yesterday.
While all residents had similar descriptions of the glowing balls of light and their slow movements back and forth across the sky, the story did take quite an eerie twist – no one was able to successfully capture the unidentified objects with a camera.
“My partner, my brother and I all saw the lights. I tried to film them on my phone, but when I later looked at the footage nothing showed up – very strange,” Phil and Karina said in an email.
“I took a very magnified photo of the last single orange orb, but it does not seem to have come out on my camera,” Martine said.
“It was very weird ... (the lights) did not seem to be flying too high above us.”
Greg said: “We saw four lights in a group,”
“I tried to take photos with my camera, but they didn’t come up.
"I grabbed my binoculars to try and get a better look.
“It was queer ... while I could see a string of lights without the binoculars, when I looked through the binoculars I could only see one light.”
UFO Research Queensland sightings officer Martin Gottschall, who has studied UFOs for more than 30 years, yesterday said he had received reports about orange balls of lights moving over Maryborough.
“It could well be UFO activity. They (UFOs) are pretty clever at camouflaging themselves and making themselves look like conventional objects,” he said.
As for the objects not showing up in photographs, Mr Gottschall said it seemed as though extraterrestrial craft could “make light do things that we haven’t learnt yet”.
“People have theorised that maybe the force field around the UFO somehow affects the way in which ordinary light like infrared shows up.
“For example, when people take photos of what they think is a UFO and there’s an aircraft nearby, the aircraft will come out defined while the UFO is hazy.”
Gay Cayabyab, the Maryborough Neighbourhood Centre’s multicultural worker, dismissed suggestions the orange lights were Chinese New Years lanterns.
“The population of Chinese in Maryborough is not very significant and it’s no longer Chinese New Year, for one,” she said.
“Lanterns are released as signs of good luck, but I’m not aware of any celebration and it’s very unlikely that they would be released for several days in a row.”
A Fraser Coast Regional Council spokesman said it was unlikely the lights were caused by aircrafts using the Maryborough Airport.
“There’s nothing out of the usual happening at the airport.”
A spokesman from the Bureau of Meteorology said yesterday he “could not think of anything weather-wise that would cause something like that” and directed the Chronicle to two different Queensland UFO organisations.
The Australian Army was contacted but did not respond to a suggestion the bright lights could have come from its Wide Bay Training Area at Tin Can Bay.
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Statement with video: Latest UFO sightings - New video of multiple UFO sightings in the sky over Sydney in Australia. This was taken on Sunday, 20th February 2011.
Witness report: Accidentally I captured a multiple U F O sightings.I didn't know what I filming.the first U F O was very fast, and change the directions to.went towards the Sydney airport. the next video, I see something that was a aeroplane, I stop filming I moved the camera, when I watch back my video I saw, the very fast object toward the aeroplane.
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Statement with video: Friday morning on checking the weather at my front veranda as I usually do a unit appeared in the north north eastern sky and paused then started a treck across the sky toward the south. I grabbed my camera from inside and these three short clips are the result. The first is in colour mode m focus to infinity. The next is with nightshot turned on. The third is a second unit in the western sky ten minutes later with super nightshot mode. Both were solid light, none strobing and within 5km all shots, no sound was heard or recorded. As the first unit was 3/4 travelled across the passage I received a light flash from a 3rd unit higher and to the east of the first just prior to losing shot. Included are still frame shots with enhancements from night session 19th Feb as no still frame shots of the units of the 25th were taken.
All my videos are shot from my property located at Greta, NSW Australia
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NOTE: Orbs, plasma-like formations, diamond shapes, etc. There have been extraordinary sightings over Australia's eastern-southeastern coast the past 2 weeks. The lights appeared in the sky above Maryborough four nights in a row. The Australian military won’t comment on the sightings so far...Lon
