This got me thinking, more data might help clarify the situation more so here are some tips that might help you capture a UFO in a photograph.

If you have a decent digital camera, try this and maybe we can get some more UFO photos, maybe some closer that will provide more detail.

The two I have captured now were both apparently quite distant so good camera optics and a long lens is helpful. With a long lens a downside is that each photo covers less of the sky but take a lot and then review them.

Go out when it’s clear and there are expanses of clear sky, or even when it’s uniformly cloudy. Take pictures of the sky all around with your camera set to the lowest ASA setting (minimal noise). You may have to manually focus to infinity because a uniform background gives the camera nothing to work with.

Now, take these photographs, and if you don’t see anything visually obvious in them already, load them into PaintShop Pro and use the “Clarify” function with a strength of 20 (maximum).

The Clarify function enhances contrast of uniform brightness areas, brings dark areas brighter, and generally helps bring out very low contrast detail.

If you don’t see anything still you can try running Clarify one more time if the background is still relatively uniform. It will result in a highly unnatural shaded image but it may make detail stand out that you might otherwise pass over.

If you find something in the processed image, then go back and see if you can find it in the original. It also helps to zoom on the image and pan.

Take multiple pictures of each area separated by some small time. While digital artifacts from the camera itself will generally be one pixel, jpeg artifacts can be bigger, multiple pictures of the same object will not only eliminate that possibility but also show movement if there is any background reference at all.

If you have raw capability, shoot in raw mode. Else use the highest quality jpeg setting possible.

Another tip, it’s a good idea to get background references so you can get some idea of how high, distant, and large the object might be.

Now, maybe just wild coincidence, but I find it highly coincidental that both objects, taken seven months apart, were almost in the exact same location and had the same visual appearance. Perhaps wild coincidence but perhaps whatever it is is a regular visitor or permanent resident of the area. I’ll test the theory by continuing to photograph that area.

If you would like to and are in the Puget Sound, this is looking North from Edmonds or Richmond Beach. It is considerably closer in the picture taken from Edmonds but it appeared to be quite a distant north of Edmonds. I don’t know what might be interesting to alien visitors farther north or if this is not something terrestrial in nature, weather balloons, some secret military technology being flown out of Whidbey Island naval airbase, or the air force airbase in Everett.

So more photos people! Get out there with your digital cameras and use them!

I’d like to mention a few things about the UFO photographs I recently posted.

After considering the first photo, before having taken the second, I thought we were just pulling out of the dock, maybe the engines churned up enough froth to actually hurl a drop of water that high (we’re talking 30 or 40 feet above the water level).

That, I thought, would explain the blurred appearance, if it were relatively close and I were focused on infinity. The part of the dock on the photo wasn’t blurred so that didn’t make total sense.

So yesterday on the way back from the bank I stopped at Richmond Beach and took some photos, and I get back and I’m processing those, and what do I see?

Another object that looks identical to the first except it is farther away and the sun is at a different angle. This would have placed the object in almost the same location as it was last August (Edmonds being farther north of Richmond Beach).

So now I thought of things like, could it be a plane or bird far enough away that it just wasn’t sharp enough to discern?

This image was about six pixels wide but the previous image was more than double that. And yet, there are other objects that are visible that are only 1-2 pixels wide in the same photo, so the lens had sufficient resolving power to resolve something cleanly onto the sensor. The fuzzy appearance of the object appears to be a property largely of the object itself.

I also took some pictures of airplanes and helicopters and birds at the resolution limit of the camera and you can make out what they are down to the point where structure, wings, etc, are only one pixel wide and become unrecognizable or disappear.

With really high contrast items, like some of the things around the house and tree parts, near the limit of resolution chromatic aberration becomes an issue (but you don’t see it much in those images because I cleaned it up with Paintshop Pro) but not with low contrast subjects.

So I use the term UFO in the most literal sense, I don’t know what these objects are but I know reasonably well what they are not, not a plane, bird, helicopter, or a common form of balloon, (though I can’t rule out some less common form, mylar weather balloon or something along those lines).

Whatever these things are they either match the color and brightness of the sky very closely, intentionally stealthy, or they are translucent or semi-transparent allowing the sky to be seen through them. If they were merely highly reflective their undersides would be dark reflecting the water beneath them but this is not the case.

Now this is high strangeness. Friday, I discovered a UFO in a photo I had taken last August that I hadn’t noticed at the time.

Monday (today) three days later I took some photos down at Richmond Beach, and one I took looking north, past Edmonds, and again, I didn’t see it when I was there, I just took a picture of some beach houses in the orange sky as the sun was heading down.

I get back, and after viewing them on the computer, what do I see? Another UFO that looks incredibly similar to the one I photographed last August in approximately the same location.

Like the one back in August, this has a roughly spherical appearance and was very close in color and brightness to the sky.

At first I thought this is probably just an ordinary airplane so far away that it’s only exposing a couple of pixels and it’s shape can’t be made out. But then I compared similar sized features near and on the beach house and the resolution is good enough that it should have been possible to make out the shape of an airplane if that’s what this was.

Click for higher resolution.

Full camera resolution of the UFO.