Read more: Local, Ufo, Pictures, MUFON, Marc, Schollett, Fact Finder, Spaceships, Aliens, Front Street, Lights, Lens Flares, Fact Finder
(Note: if you have a UFO experience to share, please post it as a comment at the bottom of this article.)
As a seasoned photographer, Carl Hawkins loves to experiment with his equipment. So when the opportunity arose for Carl to grab some gear and head to downtown Traverse City to snap some shots, he jumped on it. As Carl explains "I got a couple of new lenses this summer so I decided to go down to the tree lighting when the lit the tree a couple weeks ago and try out my new lenses at night."
Hoping to capture the spirit of the season, Carl stood near the intersection of Cass and Front Streets and starting clicking away. He took about 75 pictures of shoppers, lights, the street scene and, unknowlingly, something he couldn't identify. Carl says "I wasn't looking in the sky at all, so I didn't see it until I uploaded it on to my computer." But once home, Carl saw it plain as day. (To see Carl's original pictures click on the camera icon on the top of this page) "They are just lights in the sky but when you zoom in on them you can start to see a form. That was the interesting thing with me. They weren't saucers or anything like that, like I would expect. They were just lights."
Carl is not a big UFO Alien kind of guy but at the same time he is open to the thought that we may not be alone. Carl says "I thought that was pretty interesting so I wanted to show somebody."
And Carl hoped by showing me his photos, we might be able to find out if there was some logical explanation or not. By no means am I a UFO expert so I contacted some folks who are, the Mutual UFO network in Michigan or MUFON.
Bill Konkolesky is the state director for Michigan MUFON Inc. He says its not uncommon for folks to contact the organization with sightings they just aren't quite sure of. Konkolesy says "In 2009 alone so far we have over 250 sightings reported directly to us in Michigan alone." MUFON is a nationwide organization made of volunteer UFO investigators. They have day jobs, but as a hobby, they are specially trained to try and identify what witnesses simply can't.
Mr. Konkolseky explains the process of what happens after someone has filled out a simple online sighting report, "if its just a little slit of light in the sky at night and the person is uncertain about what it is, it might be wrapped up in a single phone call. But if there is something more substantial something worth visiting the witness, we do that much of the time. If there is further evidence like photos, we have experts not in the state we send them out to and they do there expert review of them and let us know if they think its something truly anomalous or if it could be explained away somehow."
About 80% of the time, MUFON can explain it. The sighting turns out to be a plane, a tower or a hoax. But after taking a quick look at Carl's photos, Bill Konkolseky said "I would say that I am anxious for an opportunity to have this further investigated."
Michigan MUFON Chief Investigator Gary Golem did the initial witness interview. After hearing Carl's story, and reviewing some of the pictures Mufon Michigan called in the big guns, their expert out on the East Coast who analyzes the toughest photos. Marc D'Antonio was our best shot at pinpointing exactly what the lights were. He did. Here is his complete response to Carl about the source of the lights.
"I examined your images associated with CMS case 21091. Very nice images. You very nicely captured the spirit of the season! The images presented a very nice view looking down a street in the town/city with hundreds of small lights on many trees. Due to the time exposure settings, my analysis indicates to me that these objects are indeed lens flares, generated by the time exposure, multi-element optics, and bright source lighting at night. I will use image DSC_2035 as a source example for the analysis. If you examine the flares in this image closely you can actually see secondary reflections of the branches of the trees where the branch was illuminated by the tree lights fairly brightly. The flares manifest as orange and greenish in some cases. I wanted to discuss a pair of exceptions though in the image, which although flares, are from different sources other than the tree lighting. This pair of exceptions are the two pairs of green flares visible in the image. The members of the first pair are visible in DSC_2035 as one bright greenish flare in the upper center, and then one smaller, dimmer flare further to the right superimposed on a section of the building in the shot. The second pair is seen in the image at just right of upper center and to the left of the clock tower. They appear as two bright dots of green. These bright green flares you see are from the traffic lights which are green at that moment in the image. Looking more closely at the upper center, brightest green lens flare on DSC_2035 you can see a delta pattern which if bisected, and a line extended down from it, will intersect the image-right-side green traffic light in the foreground. This flare effectively points to its source. The farther right green flare is actually the image-LEFT-SIDE green traffic light flare. Lens Flares many times are symmetric about the centerline axis of the camera lens but the accuracy of using such analysis to determine exact flare source cannot be counted on every time. I prefer to look for the symmetry of the flare and how it can directly 'point' to the source object causing it. In this case it was pretty straight-forward. Measuring the distance between the two green traffic lights, and the distance between the two larger green flares, I found that the separation distance was nearly the same. Close enough for distortion in the lens to cause differences. The second pair of green flares higher up and to the right are what I examined next. At first I could not figure out where these came from as I assumed they were part of the tree lighting flares. But upon closer examination I saw that there is a more DISTANT pair of green traffic lights and these undoubtedly are the culprits as the green LED traffic lights are exceedingly bright and quite capable of generating lens flares at great distance. Measurements of the separation of the distant traffic lights and the separation distance of the smaller pair of green flares illustrated a similar 'within reason' distance accounting for lens distortion in the flare. Lastly, the green light flares were also very close in color to the traffic lights. Their color was shifted slightly toward the blue as expected due to lens coatings. The remaining flare artifacts were part of the tree lighting and did suffer a color shift when they 'flared' which is not uncommon. The camera lens coatings actually can cause this and since the lenses are multi-element, each element of a lens may have a coating which can tend to send the light toward the blue or red end of the spectrum depending on what type of artifact the lens generates. Sometimes you get rainbows, sometimes bluish artifact reflections, sometimes red reflections. In summary, in this case, CMS 21091 it is pretty clear that the images suffered a number of lens flare artifacts. If you have any questions please let me know. I am happy to respond.Marc D'Antonio MUFON Photo Analyst "
So, the UFO is no longer unindentified. Another case solved for MUFON, another viewer's questions answered for the Fact Finders.
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