Pza

Flying Pizzas And Blown-Up Planets

DVDs Now Available At Project P.R.O.V.E.!

There have been a number of "UFO" cases, in recent times, of video footage purporting to show images of UFOs morphing in shape, and changing color. The majority of these are coming from the United Kingdom. In one particular instance, an American production company paid $35,000 (£20,000) for exclusive rights to use the footage in a future broadcast. The image in this case is often referred to as the "Flying Pizza"

In early January 2002, a young woman wrote me from her home in England. She asked me to verify that her friend had indeed filmed a genuine U.F.O. with their home camcorder outside of a party on New Years Eve 2001. Let's take a look at what the sky was like at the time. The witness stated that it was late evening, on 31 December 2001, clear and the object was to her south.

Since we don't know exactly where in Britain the film was taken, we have to go with a sky chart representing an average location. For this purpose I chose Liverpool at 23:30 hrs. on 31 December, 2001 for a close approximation.

Alpha Canis Majoris, or Sirius (The Dog Star) is the brightest star in the night sky of Earth. Only the Sun, Moon, and planets outshine it. As can be seen from the chart above, Sirius is in roughly the same position as the stated position of the object filmed by the young couple at the party.

Now, we return to the question: Why did the object change shape and color? I own a home camcorder myself, and I can tell you that when you film point of light sources in the night sky, the camera simply MUST be set to manual focus. If the camera is not set to manual focus, it will "hunt" for focus, going radically from one extreme to the other over and over again.

In February 2002, my son and I were outdoors to record a pass of ISSy. After ISSy had gone, I decided to try to duplicate the object in the English woman's tape. For this purpose, I used the planet Jupiter as a nice bright light source. I set the camcorder to auto-focus, and proceeded to zoom in on Jupiter. Sure enough, I got images the same as the "flying pizzas" from England. See the still shot below from my tape.

Look at the picture above. Doesn't that "object" look just like the images coming from British camcorders of late? I think it does. It is actually the planet Jupiter in the skies over Sacramento, California in February, 2002. This is the result of tight zoom, on auto-focus, with an ordinary home camcorder at night. Now, when I told the young woman that her pictures were the result of camera characteristics, she decided not to talk to me any more. She took her case to a UFO researcher in Denmark. He argued that the object was not an out of focus star or planet, because in a portion of the original English film, there was a street lamp, and it was in focus. Therefore, he said the object must be in focus also. Well, have a look at the next still shot below.

This is another still frame from my own video tape shot in February, 2002 of the planet Jupiter. Notice that Jupiter is bloated beyond recognition, while the street lamp is nearly focused. The lamp is certainly no more OUT of focus than the one in the British tape. So, I think we can lay to rest any mystery to all of these "flying pizzas" as actual unidentified flying objects. Chances are they are just images of celestial objects being taken with cameras on the wrong setting to get sharp pictures.