Hmm, how to think about this
I was sitting on my balcony with my coffee and toast watching the pure blue sky. It was a warm July with no discernible breeze and a cloudless sky. I leaned back and blissfully gazed into the infinite blue.
A white orb caught my attention as it suddenly appeared and moved gracefully and steadily high up in the sky. My immediate thought was that it was the “parachute” seed of a Taraxacum plant. But it was late in the season for them, and it was rather high up — several stories above my fourth-story balcony.
What fully captured my attention was the white orb moved in a perfectly straight line. It didn’t wobble about like a Taraxacum parachute does in a breeze. The orb floated at a constant speed in that straight line away from me, but it didn’t seem to be getting smaller. It moved for nearly ten seconds until it disappeared.
I wondered what I had seen while I returned to my kitchen to refill my coffee. Was that one of those white orb UFOs so many people have claimed to see? Highly unlikely, I thought. Couldn’t be. And yet …
I’m neither a skeptic nor a believer in UFOs. I am firmly in the open-minded middle on what UFO phenomena are about. And as I argued in that article, we need to think realistically about UFOs.
I sipped my coffee and ran through the possibilities.
It could have been a genuine UFO/UAP or whatever you want to call it. Heck, what little I had just witnessed would be the subject of a whole episode of tabloid television show, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch (of which I am not a fan). The steady straight line movement was odd, almost eerie. I’d be happy to see a UFO, and I had to be sure not to be too eager to interpret the experience in favor of my desires over the evidence. We don’t create our reality, but we do choose our interpretations of it.
It could have been a genuine Taraxacum parachute. Yes, the movement of the object was odd, but in an infinite universe, the conditions could have been just right to produce a perfectly straight steady movement for nearly ten seconds. The simplest solution is often the correct one. Thanks, William.
Coffee being the elixir of life and intellectual activity, I sipped more of the magic fluid while I mulled over the two very different possibilities. Being a philosopher who explores the nature of beliefs, I wondered yet again how people interpret what they perceive. How many people would immediately leap to the conclusion of one possibility or the other? How many people spend the time and energy to think it through?
What did I see? Could it possibly have been something beyond the ordinary? How does one think about such things?
I returned to the balcony and whatever spirits there may be lurking around playfully provided an answer to my contemplation. Another white orb, this one only a few meters from me, wobbled into view. This was clearly a Taraxacum parachute. The spines were clearly visible on this one. Whether it was the season for them or not, two other parachutes floated by.
Okay, the mundane explanation was the more likely one. The conditions were just right to produce a perfectly straight movement of a Taraxacum parachute for nearly ten seconds.
Ah, well. It was, at least, an interesting thought exercise, even if boring won out. Although . . . that object’s movement was a little odd . . .