On February 11, 1997, at approximately 3:00 A.M. local time, I had a close encounter with a UFO. Actually, multiple UFOs.
I was in Florida with my family to attend a Space Shuttle launch. I had been working at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland for nearly two years, helping to calibrate a new camera that was to be placed on board the Hubble Space Telescope. All of us who had worked on the camera got passes to see the Shuttle launch in Florida, and we were all excited about seeing our camera lofted into space.
The launch was scheduled fro 3:55 A.M. That’s not the best time to appreciate the spectacle and fury of rocket launch, but the vagaries of orbital mechanics demanded such liftoff. My mom volunteered to baby-sit our infant daughter Zoe, so my father, my wife, my nephew, and I made our way to Cape Canaveral around 1:00 A.M. We quickly found out that several thousand other people were also attending. Too excited to nap, my father and I wandered around talking to the other attendees. Many people had telescopes set up to watch the distant shuttle, proudly standing under the intense glare of multiple spotlights. To see it we had to peer across a long stretch of the Banana River that separates the cape from mainland Florida. The cape is surrounded by water, and by wildlife. We actually saw a couple of alligators, which is a weird sight so close to such a technological marvel.
About an hour before the launch, I spotted some unusual lights in the night sky, a dozen or more, to the right of the launch pad from our viewpoint. They were perhaps at the same distance from us as the pad, about 10 kilometers (6 miles), although it was hard to tell. My father pointed out that they were moving, so we kept watching. The movement was very slow, as if they were hovering. I figured it was a group of distant spotting planes, but then I remembered that NASA only uses one or two planes to sweep around the area. No other planes are allowed near the shuttle; it is jealously guarded by NASA for obvious reasons.
My next guess was birds, but these objects were glowing. Baloons? No, they were moving too quickly. No satellites group together like that. My excitement mounted, despite my more rational thoughts. What were they? As I watched, I noticed that they were moving together, but not in a straight line. They weaved slightly. That ruled out satellites and a host of other mechanical objects.
I refused to think of any ridiculous explanations involving anything, well, ridiculous. But what were these things? All I could see through binoculars were glowing dots.
Their flight path was taking them to my right as I continued to watch them through binoculars. Slowly, faintly, I could hear a noise they were making. It was eerie, odd, difficult to place. Then, suddenly, the noise got louder, and the objects in my binoculars resolved themselves. My mind and heart raced. I was seeing….
…. a flock of ducks. As they flew by us they were just a few hundred meters away, and they were unmistakably terrestrial waterfowl. The noise we heard earlier was their quacking, muffled by distance, and their otherworldly glow was just the reflected light of the fleet of spotlights flooding the Shuttle pad. The duck’s weaving flight was obvious now, too. They appeared to be hovering when we first saw them because they were so far away and were heading roughly towards us.
