Phunday Phour

This weekend is The Amazing Roswell UFO Festival, celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the "1947 UFO Incident." Looks there are all kinds of ways to spend your money in Roswell (though a tether ride on the pictured balloon only costs you a wait in line.)

And the good folks in Roswell aren't the only ones cashing in on alien fears and fascination. For only $19, you can get this cell phone strap which will detect UFOs and space aliens (or perhaps an "undefined existence"). It apparently has a chip inside it. I wonder how it actually works - like a mood ring? like a lie detector? random number generator?

I saw a UFO once, at least in the sense that what appeared to be a being of pure energy* hovering not two meters away is a UFO. Fits the unidentified part of UFO, anyway!

Here's the story.

I was lying on my sofa, looking out the door past the trees outside - staring off into space, you might say. As I was doing this, I noticed the alleged hovering being of pure light, in front of me, but off to the side a bit. I turned to look, but it was gone.** Why would the alien creature visit me, only to be too shy to let me look at it?

Seriously, I was disappointed that it disappeared, because I wanted to figure out what it was. So I went back to doing what I was doing when it appeared, staring off into space, and sure enough - there it was, off to the side again, where I couldn't get a good look at it. This time I decided to sneak up on it, or rather to gradually refocus my eyes and gradually turn my head. And sure enough, doing so gradually allowed me to identify the unidentified.

Was it an alien? No. It was two almost identically sized and shaped gaps between leaves that the bright sky was able to shine through. When my eyes were unfocused, my brain interpreted these two bright shapes as being the same bright shape seen by my two different eyes. When your two eyes see the same thing in substantially different places, the brain determines that that thing is very close (maybe a meter or two away). Nature was just doing to me what 3-D movies do all the time: fooling me into thinking there was an object up close that wasn't really there at all.

Figuring it out was more fun than thinking I'd seen an alien any day.

_{*I, of course, am a being of pure energy, but we're not talking about a being of matter-energy here, but one of pure light-energy.
**I was comfortable, but not numb.}