Of course, no one can tell what a real alien spacecraft will look like, but following up on the theme I introduced in the previous post, I would like to think that true alien tech would exhibit a bizarre and strange aspect so unlike what we are told to expect by Hollywood, or press reports of UFOs.

I'm an amateur astronomer who spends a lot of time looking at the sky, and I am familiar with a wide variety of celestial and atmospheric phenomena, both man-made and natural. But I have seen things that really creeped me out, that made the hair on my neck stand up, and sent shivers up and down my spine. I have seen things that made me tell myself "Holy shit, is this finally the real thing?"

Here are two of them, not sightings that actually turned out to be alien spacecraft, but things that had me convinced, at least for a moment, that they were. They were strange enough to make me believe.

One night I came out of the house and far to the north, about 20 degrees above the horizon, I witnessed a sequence of brightly colored geometrical designs confined to a tiny area of sky, a bit like the light displays on the giant mother ship in "Close Encounters".

For a brief moment I was convinced it was the real thing. An alien spacecraft, nothing else could possibly explain that thing. I quickly ducked inside and grabbed my binoculars, only to be disappointed. It was The Goodyear Blimp, and the 'colored geometrical designs' were moving letters on the side of the gas bag spelling out advertising copy for some sporting event.

Another time, I tracked a pulsating glowing object across the night sky with a small spotting scope. It looked like a glowing, throbbing amoeba flying through space. Right at the limit of visibility, I could glimpse just enough detail to tell it was like nothing I had ever seen before. It took me a while before I finally figured out what could look like that under those conditions: a tied-together cluster of aluminized mylar-coated party balloons purchased at and escaped from the supermarket upwind of me, reflecting the sodium vapor streetlights of Fort Lauderdale.

UFOs need to be STRANGE, but that isn't enough. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition.