At one point I thought I could tell when it was midnight by the position of Mars over my house. Mars glows slightly reddish and it easily the brightest star I can see. But I soon found out, Mars progresses clockwise across the southern sky. By last night midnight was far closer to where 2pm is on a clock, maybe later, I'm not sure. I just know it had surprised me when I got back from 4 nights away from my deck perspective. I wish I would have paid more attention. Either way, I couldn't even tell you how many hours passed 1, 2 or 3 after I had notice Mars in the sky.
What I can tell you is this... like every night for months, I'm hanging out with spaceman, last night it was, like usual, a little messaging through FB and soon a phone call that always lasts until an early hour.
I could tell you other things we talked about last night, but I won't. The point is, we were talking about some subject at length, I had finished saying my thoughts on the matter and spaceman was responding and elaborating. I was listening and at the same time my eyes were perusing the sky, aimlessly.
There's always more than one, usually multiples of planes at various distances in my sky, all around. I live between the Dayton International Airport and Wright Patterson Air Force Base. There are always planes from one or both airports in my view.
Along with the starry sky, I'm also noticing flight patterns. As I'm writing this, a big gray military plane, just flew nearby. They circle and land, do touch downs, to build up flight hours. Flight hours are important. The more you fly the better you are. By the time I finished composing and editing that sentence, a commercial flight just flew a now familiar path south to north, east of my house. I bet there's more there than I can see, since it's not dark yet.
Well, last night I was listening intently to spaceman and noticing a plane flying in the far distance, blinking across the sky west to east. I also happened to notice another red/white blinking plane moving from generally the bottom center of my sky over my house, up slightly back-slash-ish, but more straight up and down than that. I'm sorry, I don't do angles very well. Less than 45°, bottom center up to the left, the east. Now that I think about it, I'm not quite sure it was coming from south so much as coming from down to up or some slant of that. At the time I was glancing from one plane flashing to the other, imaging their intersection. At that point, my thoughts turned to imagining them intersecting. Dismissing them actually being in any intersection path, I giggled at my worry. But at that point I was less listening to spaceman and more drawn in to paying attention to these two seemingly about to intersect planes. They seemed to be travelling toward intersecting, but air traffic controllers would NEVER let that happen. I know, planes must be one mile vertically from one another when crossing nearby. At least, that's what I think I recall from a Sinclair Community College "field trip" to tour the air traffic control towers. So, my logical mind was dismissing any danger and my imagination was fascinated and just HAD to stare intently until they passed one another.
And then it happened. When the lower red blinking plane got close to intersecting with the horizontal travelling plane, the red blinking plane zipped off at a greater than 90 degree angle to the east (to be level horizontally), then once out beyond where the plane would soon be, it zipped up at 90 degrees to fly past out front of the horizontally travelling plane and and then once out front and above that plane, it turned yet again and headed off in seemingly the same trajectory as it was using on their approach, up to the left some.
Now tell me, what "plane" makes those maneuvers? None that I've ever seen in my life having grown up near an air force base. It's not just any air force base, it's home of project blue book, the "cover-up investigation" into the UFO phenomenon. There are legends of under ground tunnel systems, and one of the dead aliens from the famous Rosewell crash was supposedly autopsied there. There is video leaked, thought it is crappy video, as usual. So frustrating, but it was in the 1940s, I believe.
Anyway, that was my first "ufo" encounter. I've been waiting MY WHOLE LIFE to finally see a ufo. It was shocking and I exclaimed it to spaceman immediately as it happened. Wow! So ordinary sounding and yet, real! Tell me, how does the starry night sky compare to mind-numbing TV? The sky is amazing!
