The stunning image of a UFO was captured on video last week, but is it an alien craft, or is there a simpler explanation?
Anthony Piceno, of American Fork, Utah, said he was drawn to the sight in the air because it was like nothing he had ever seen before. His footage of the object later appeared on The Weather Channel.
The video shows the blue craft resembling a spinning top floating in the sky and moving very slowly. Mr Piceno said: ‘I looked up in the sky and, you know, it was just a different object, it was neon blue, red flashing lights’.
He watched the object floating in the sky for a few minutes, observing how it was ‘just cruising slow’ in the sky. But as with any UFO sighting, there are skeptics, who have their own ideas about what the flying object really was.
Lynn Hadfield, president of Utah Valley Aeromodelers, told The Weather Channel that he believes the lights are nothing more than radio-controlled planes in nearby Art Dye Park. Mr Hadfield said: ‘I believe it’s an RC plane with lights… There have been a number of people who spot these around and wonder if they were UFOs’. Chris Santacroce of Superfly Paragliding contends that Mr Piceno may have seen a paraglider in the area, although doing so at night is illegal.
Mr Santacroce told the network: ‘If that was a paraglider over American Fork, then it wouldn’t be the first time a paraglider flew at night with some lights on it’. This is not the first time suspicious objects have been seen hovering in the sky in the area, as several people have reported close encounters in the past few months.
Last year, a top secret FBI memo detailing how police and army officers witnessed a UFO exploding over Utah was unearthed. The cable, marked ‘URGENT’ and sent to then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, details how an army guard, a policeman and a highway patrol, who were all miles apart, each saw a UFO, which they said exploded over mountains near Logan, north of Salt Lake City.
The memo is one of thousands of previously unreleased classified files that the bureau has made public in an online resource called The Vault. Under the title ‘Flying Discs’, the document about the sightings in Utah said the three men each ‘saw a silver coloured object high up approaching the mountains at Sardine Canyon’ that ‘appeared to explode in a rash of fire.’
It added: ‘Several residents [reported] seeing what appeared to be two aerial explosions, followed by falling object.’ Documents show that an earlier UFO sighting had been investigated in Logan in September 1947.
It said numerous witnesses told the FBI they saw ‘flying discs’ in formation that were ‘circling the city at a high rate of speed’.
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