my sighting of a dumbell UFO in the 1990's

hey all, i reckoned it was about time i shared my only encounter with a ufo - i did not want to share it on first joining as i thought it may lack some credibilty so i decided to wait untill i had been around a while and folk had got the chance to realize that i'm not a pure woo-head crazy

i've done a search on the matter a few times and found very little in the way of similar threads, and certainly not anything in the last three or four years.

now i dont have pics, i actually dont have an exact year it happened in. daft, i know. i'll deal with the no pics issue when i tell the story in a mo, but re the lack of date... frankly when i saw the ufo, i was not freaked as i didnt think it a life changing event, i never wrote it down, it was just another event in an already reasonably interesting life and i just kind of nodded my head appreciately, watched it, then got on with things.

soooo...this happened in spring of 93 or 94, pretty much in Birmingham, the one in England.
it was about 2 pm in the afternoon, i'd just had lunch and i was sitting in my kitchen having a ciggie (not of the jazz variety either before anyone asks) and looking at the lovely clear blue un cloud obstructed sky. something caught my eye, and it was a glinting, moving dumbell shape, at fairly high altitude. i was looking at an angle of roughly 40 ish degrees from the horizontal.
i actually did not own a camera at the time, and did not want to go to the neighbours with chat about ufos and a wish to borrow one only for it to have dissappeared by then, or to produce the usual crappy amateur pic which shows next to nowt.

so i sat and observed it for about 15 minutes.

it was very clearly visible to me (i have some thing like 20/20.25 vision if i remember right, meaning i have better than average longer distance sight apparantly) pretty much the whole time. it was a silvery, highly reflective dumbell shape, and i could see the sun reflecting off it very clearly too, and the reflection moving around as it gently tumbled through the sky, moving in a variety of directions quite fluidly.
the shape was consistent and distinct, each end of the dumbell/each bell was a tall diamond shape, but flat at the top and bottom, and the bar that joined them was consistent and clearly visible the whole time too. if i held my little finger at arms length, the entire dumbell would have been roughly half as wide as my finger nail.

it appeared to have a smooth texture, which i assessed from the reflections i mentioned above. it may or may not be relevant, but having looked at a map since to see where it may have been flying/hovering/tumbling above, it was reasonably accurately in the direction of birmingham international airport, and although it was impossible for me to judge its distance accurately, it is quite possible that it was roughly the same distance away - of course i had seen many aircraft while i lived at that address and thats really the only comparable thing that i can use to assess that.

i have not linked to other threads that have similar info, mainly as my pc is being a turd at present as is the new search..... a few months back i found a thread about these being seen near buxton, and also monsal dale in derbyshire, between 1 and 2 hours drive from where i viewed these. however they would not have been over b'ham airport.

well thats all i got folks, i'm happy to answer any questions and welcome comments and interpretations, thanks for reading.

regarding it's disappearance - over the 15 mins i watched it, and as it moved, it got smaller to the point that it was no longer visible, presumably due to a mixture of distance and changes in the brightness of the sunlight reducing the reflected light i was seeing. i lost sight of it a couple of times before finding it again, until i lost sight of it for 4-5 mins and i just got on with my day

i chatted the sighting over with a few local friends and family over the next few weeks and no one else had seen it.

thanks

Sounds similar to the Nazi bell(Die Glocke).

en.wikipedia.org...

Die Glocke (German for "The Bell") was a purported top secret Nazi scientific technological device, secret weapon, or Wunderwaffe. First described by Polish journalist and author Igor Witkowski in Prawda o Wunderwaffe.

reply to post by andy06shake


hiya, thanks for commenting.

now in my limited knowledge of that story, the nazi bell was represented as an actual bell shape. this was a dumbell, ie: a bar connecting two two larger features, in this case two diamond shaped ends (one at each end)

to save any confusion, this is what i mean by a dumbell

reply to post by skalla


We all interpret things differently
therefor I suggest you present a drawing of what you have seen
Use paint, should not be to hard with all the details you remember

reply to post by skalla


Seems i misinterpreted the scenario, guess that makes me the dumb bell. LoL

reply to post by skalla

...and i could see the sun reflecting off it very clearly too, and the reflection moving around as it gently tumbled through the sky, moving in a variety of directions quite fluidly.

...it appeared to have a smooth texture, which i assessed from the reflections i mentioned above.

...it was reasonably accurately in the direction of birmingham international airport

Thanks for sharing your experience

Now this is only a thought, yet do you think that it could have possibly have been mylar ballons/weather balloons of some sort??

reply to post by Spacespider


Hiya, i appreciate your point.

sadly, once i had opened paint for the first time in about ten years and made my child-like picture, it saves as a bitmap which it seems ats uploads will not accept.

for me, i use computers mostly for accessing info on the net, and reading articles and forums etc.

i'm more at home in the woods than i am with file types and stuff like that, apologies

ETA:



the colour is not representative, simply to fill the space and define the shape

reply to post by Perhaps


thanks for the response - well it tumbled around a lot, slowly twisting and turning, doing slow figure-of-eights and such in a seemingly random way. it was not windy where i observed it from if that makes much difference, though due to altitude, most likely not.

i dont know the range of shapes that weather balloons may appear in, but the shape/dimensions were consistent/unchanged for the entire time that i observed it. thats all i could say regarding your question

Originally posted by skalla
reply to post by Spacespider

 

Hiya, i appreciate your point.

sadly, once i had opened paint for the first time in about ten years and made my child-like picture, it saves as a bitmap which it seems ats uploads will not accept.

for me, i use computers mostly for accessing info on the net, and reading articles and forums etc.

i'm more at home in the woods than i am with file types and stuff like that, apologies

ETA:

the colour is not representative, simply to fill the space and define the shape

edit on 14-3-2013 by skalla because: (no reason given)

Looks vaguely familiar...

reply to post by draknoir2


i'm lol'ing

once i had completed my paint based magnum opus, the same notion struck me too

Originally posted by skalla
reply to post by draknoir2

 

i'm lol'ing

once i had completed my paint based magnum opus, the same notion struck me too

Well, unless your sighting was accompanied by a sinister orchestral score, that's most likely not what you saw.

Originally posted by skalla
frankly when i saw the ufo, i was not freaked as i didnt think it a life changing event, i never wrote it down, it was just another event in an already reasonably interesting life and i just kind of nodded my head appreciately, watched it, then got on with things.

I have a feeling that more often than not that is how such sightings are handled, speaking from personal experience. You think that if something like that were to happen to you it would completely shatter your world view and change you from that point forward, but when it happens it's more of a novelty that quickly fades with the passage of time. I'm an "experiencer" myself, and I don't mean the crystal-gripping new age hippie definition. I have friends that have to document every event with photos and video... all time I feel should be spent experiencing the event, so I can see how you would dispense with the hassle of finding a camera in favor of observing the object while you could. As for the dates, I'm the same way. I've had a few bizarre experiences myself, and in none of those cases do I remember the actual date. Guesstimate of year is the best I can do based on things like weather, where it was, and what I was doing at the time.

Seems counter intuitive, but I find hyper-detailed eyewitness accounts to be less credible.

reply to post by draknoir2


i completely agree with you, the experience by far trumps the concurrent documenting of it.

i always find it quite weird, when at concerts and festivals for example, people spend considerable time filming it on their phone/camera etc. i'm too busy getting wasted and jumping around thats another thread though