Extraordinarily Mundane Explanations

All too often in this field we run across footage or photographs that appear strange, but ultimately turn out to have a mundane explanation.  But when we look back at the suggestions given on why a given piece of footage couldn’t possibly be paranormal, we end up sometimes with some extremely strange mundane explanations.  This was the case recently with footage of what some suggested was a UFO.

The video was uploaded to Youtube and showed a white streak of light stretching across the sky and leaving behind it a very bright contrail.  As it reaches a certain altitude it then expands quickly and then releases what appears to be a smaller object out of the front end of it.  After approximately a minute into the film this smaller object eventually disappears altogether.  So what was it?  Could it have been an extraterrestrial craft?  Or was it a rip in the fabric of space and time itself?  It turns out the object being filmed was most likely a spaceship, although it was very much made on Earth.

But that doesn’t stop the long slew of strange sightings that appeared shortly after it was uploaded from seeming particularly strange and inaccurate.  Debunkers proclaimed the object throughout the internet to be a number of things that were fairly odd to begin with, but really took off when the extraordinary was mentioned.  And though the craft didn’t turn out to be a flying saucer hovering over Japan, an alien saucer may not have been the strangest explanation out there.

In the vast sea of comments on the film, speculators suggested it could be a meteor that had somehow been pulled upward away from Earth at some course during its descent and back into space.  They suggested a weather balloon made of an unknown material that had leaked a flammable substance out of a small hole in it and then continued to rise being propelled upward at an incredible speed by the heat from the jet of gas leaking out that had somehow been ignited.  And finally there was some speculation that it could be an ICBM launch.  The last explanation, while not necessarily the strangest may have been more terrifying than a UFO on any day.  It wasn’t until around mid day that the real explanations gained a foothold when word of Japan’s rocket launch reached mainstream media attention.

While it may seem trivial to examine the suggestions made by others of what turns out to be a mundane video, it might be interesting to use this explanation as a new backdrop when looking at the UFO phenomenon.  Mundane explanations are not universally believable or even necessarily more logical than accepting a more phenomenal possibility.  Such was the case with the now famous “Swamp Gas” redaction as an official explanation for what was commonly held to be paranormal phenomena.

The video here shows a rocket launch.  And while it may not be as incredible as an extraterrestrial craft, consider a hundred and fifty years ago when footage of a manmade rocket heading up into space would have been commonly considered equally impossible then as an extraterrestrial craft is today.