Thermodyne writes:
> What? You guys (& gals) never saw a UFO?
Actually I did, although I'm almost certain it was really a "fireball" type meteor.
It was the late nineteen-fifties, and I was a kid spending summer vacation with my mother and siblings on the ancestral family farm in northwest Iowa. I was alone in a semi-wooded area (the farm's "orchard"); the time was about twilight. Through a break in the trees above I spotted a circular object about the apparent size of the full moon. It appeared to be burning with a reddish-orange light and trailed tiny flames as it moved south to north. It didn't seem to be moving very fast, but it passed behind the trees again probably in less than ten seconds. I ran to another clear spot, but couldn't reacquire it. I fetched my mother and we searched the sky from a better location, but all we could see were the moon and the comet that was visible that summer.
In later years I saw film of fireballs on TV and the internet and figured that was probably what I saw. "My" UFO lacked the debris and smoky trail of the filmed meteors, but I could easily have missed those details in the gathering darkness.
Recently I wondered if anyone had reported "my" UFO, so I tried to nail down the time. The only late fifties comet that matches the time (naked-eye visibility in both August -- when I was in Iowa -- and September -- when I was home in New York) is MRKOS, 1957. On the Web I found a couple of UFO/meteor reports similar to mine, but none that fit both time and place. So I guess I'm really reporting a UPIFO - Unconfirmed Probably-Identified Flying Object.
