UFO Type: Small, darkish, reddish blob with shape change.

Sighting Duration: 56 seconds between first and last photo.

Date: July 10, 2010.

Time: 8 PM.

Place: At a SW Portland, Oregon, park.

Witnesses: Keith Rowell, OM Assistant State Director; Randy Bell, Portland UFO Network Director; Will, a member of PUFON.

Randy Bell, the Director of the Portland UFO Network, holds UFO sky watches in the Portland, Oregon, area every three to four weeks. Anywhere from three to eight people have accompanied Randy on his watches. The point of the watches is to witness UFO activity and to hopefully photograph and/or videotape UFOs, too.

To be successful, you need to have a digital camera (or camcorder) with at least a five times zoom lens (the UFOs are generally pretty small) and hang around Randy because he attracts UFOs like nectar attracts bees! Seriously, some people seem to be psychically in tune with UFOs and Randy is one of them. He has seen and photographed numerous UFOs in the last few years. After a close sighting of a UFO, Randy started photographing UFOs and then decided he wanted to share his interest. He created the Portland UFO Network in the spring of 2010, and he's had a number of successful UFO watches since.

Photographing UFOs at a PUFON Sky Watch

People generally do not see UFOs. Randy tells people to simply focus their cameras on infinity and point them at a spot in the sky where they "feel" UFOs might be. With Randy, this feeling is more than a feeling; it is a deeper psychic intuition. Randy might take a couple of hundred photos in an hour. UFOs show up in perhaps one, two, or three percent of his photos.

As you might expect, a lot of curious things show up in his photos besides UFOs. These curious things are perfectly ordinary bird "smears," bug "smears," tree cotton stuff, airplanes, etc. This particular time (7-10-10) we spotted and photographed some party balloons drifting by. Sometimes it can be a challenge picking out the UFOs from the normal stuff moving around in our air and sky.

What UFOs (Mostly) Look Like in Photos

Generally, UFOs are very dark, or very light, or colored. They are circular, oval, or oddly angular, or change shape rapidly in a quick sequence of photos on continuous shutter mode. They can include very dark and very light areas in one shape. Birds and bugs are generally of medium gray or brown, not really dark or really light, and they are elongated smears because they are moving fast relative to the field of view. Many times, birds are quite recognizable as, for example, a hawk or swift. Airplanes are not hard to recognize. Balloons are easy unless they are very far away and the pixel size is less than 10 across or so. (Balloons are more rare than UFOs when you are with Randy!)

Photos Without Eyewitness Experience Not Very Evidential

UFOs captured by video or photography when you don't see the UFO are a very low value UFO experience because all you have is the video or photo to interpret. But trying to capture UFOs photographically seemingly at random (or is it truly psychically?) is still fun, and you will learn a lot about the natural/conventional world trying to separate your UFOs from everything else.

Camera Artifacts

Speaking of that "everything else," you will also run into digital camera and video artifacts, so be prepared to learn a lot as you separate the UFO wheat from the artifact and natural/conventional world chaff. A common DSLR artifact is the pesky dust mote adhering to the sensor inside your camera.  My dust motes show up as medium gray, fuzzy, round blobs of 30 to 40 pixels in diameter.  (Time to clean the sensor!)  Also, I have a dead pixel on my sensor that shows up as a white pixel surrounded symmetrically by four other white ones. Dust motes can move around from photo to photo, but dead pixels will stay in exactly the same place.

The UFO Photo Evidence for Our Outing

The upshot is: the most important thing seems to be to find a fellow like Randy and hang around him. Then sooner or later you'll start photographing UFOs as I have done.  Good luck and start your own photographic UFO hunt!

The four photos below are almost certainly of UFOs and probably the same object. I did not see it at the time, but at about the same time Randy and PUFON member Will were using 15 power binoculars and spotted a UFO of generally the same description visually as you see here in the photos.

Note the times the photos were taken. The same 640 mm telephoto lens (35 mm equiv.) was used on a Canon 40D at the same zoom extent for all photos. The Photoshop magnifications are the same for all four photos at 400%. Note the shape change within one second between photos 1596 and 1597.

Photo # -- Time

Photoshop Array of UFO Photographs

UFO Description: A group of six people at one location and one person at another location more than a mile away saw a train of glowing reddish-orange orbs moving more or less northward.

Witness(es): Joe Smith (pseudonym) and family, and Jane Brown (pseudonym).

Time and Date: May 17, 2010, from about 10:00 to 10:10 PM.

Duration: About 10 minutes.

Place: Close-in southwest and southeast, Portland, Oregon.

Weather: Cloudy, but clear below; wind from the south, 12 mph; temperature 55 degrees.

Case Report: SE Portland Glowing Reddish Orange Train of UFOs (long download). Investigated by Keith Rowell.

Brief Narrative

Note: I thank Joe Smith and Jane Brown for cooperating fully with this investigation, and I also thank them for communicating so effectively the results of their excellent powers of observation. Without the latter, UFO investigations are inconclusive at best.  Ufology owes much to the hundreds of thousands of UFO witnesses in the last 60 years who have accurately observed and then accurately communicated their observations, so that UFO investigators could determine that there is in fact something like 10% to 20% of the time a strange, yet real, phenomenon in our skies.

This UFO case was identified as a somewhat unusual, but fairly common thing. You can try out your skills as a UFO investigator to see how soon you can figure out what the ID is.  I've tried to write my case report to delay the ID till the end, so don't look ahead!  Download the case report above and be an armchair investigator!

The illustration below will get you started.  This is the view from Joe Smith's place except that the sighting took place at night.

Joe Smith's View of Glowing Reddish-Orange Train of UFOs

UFO Description: A woman, walking her dog, saw a low-flying, classic triangle UFO right outside the front door to her home.

Witness(es): Joan Tellerman (pseudonym).

Time and Date: March 19, 2010, at about 8:15 PM.

Duration: About 15 seconds.

Place: West Linn, Oregon.

Weather: Clear sky, visibility 10 miles; wind: NNE, 8.1 mph; temperature 57 degrees.

Case Report: West Linn Cruising Triangle Close Encounter (long download). Investigated by Keith Rowell.

Brief Narrative

As Joan Tellerman (pseudonym) was getting ready to take her dog out for a walk, she had the odd, fleeting thought that she should take a camera but didn't because she's not a picture-taker and didn't even have a cellphone with a camera. Mere seconds later just as she was going outside her front door, she heard the neighborhood dogs barking and howling in a rather unusual way.

Then she looked up and saw a classic triangular, low-flying UFO. It was very close to the ground at perhaps a hundred to two hundred feet above her as it followed a straight line path from SE to NW. She got the impression that it was just clearing the trees and she expected it to crash, but it didn't.

It was going away from her so she ran across the street in front of her home to follow its direction. It was heading away fast and was about to be obscured by trees so she jogged to her left to find a better opening in the trees. That's when she last saw it. During the 15 seconds or so that she saw it, she got a very good look at its underside.  She clearly saw that it was "metallic and industrial-looking, like a military tank."  It was illuminated but not brightly so.

Tellerman's Drawing of the UFO

UFO Description: Two motorists in separate vehicles and unknown to each other apparently observed the same triangular object flying low and slow over Interstate Highway I-5.

Witness(es): Betty Wilson (pseudonym) and James Carney (pseudonym).

Time and Date: August 12, 2009, at 8:15 to 8:30 PM.

Duration: About 15 minutes total.

Place: Near Woodburn, Oregon.

Weather: Scattered high clouds, visibility 10 miles; wind two mph out of west, gusts to ten mph; temperature 68 degrees F.

Case Report: I-5 Flying Triangle (long download). Investigated by Tom Bowden.

Brief Narrative

Betty Wilson (pseudonym) was driving northbound on Interstate Highway I-5, the major interstate in Oregon, near Woodburn, Oregon.  She saw a darkish object off to her left with three bright lights on it.  The lights were in the middle bottom of the triangular object.  It crossed over I-5 at an estimated altitude of 100 to 200 feet.  She estimated the length to be 200 feet or so.  She heard no sound.  When she could stop, the object was not visible any longer.

Meanwhile, James Carney (pseudonym) was traveling north on I-5 a couple of minutes behind Betty Wilson to the south around eight or so miles.  He saw a bright, low-level light that soon became a structured, triangular object with lights on its underside.  He estimated it was maybe 50 feet over I-5 as it crossed I-5 about 300 feet ahead of him.  He continued to drive north watching the object.  He last saw it to his right (east of the highway) about a few hundred feet away hovering in a field not far from the NORPAC Foods cannery south of Woodburn.

James Carney's Drawing of the Triangular UFO
(Arrow shows direction of movement.)