Re: OT: My UFO Encounter.. (True Story)
Did you wear contacts in 1974? The jerky path you describe (zoom, hover, zoom, hover) is quite similar to what one would expect from "search" eye motion, or a contact lens recentering itself from such motion. So if, say, this was an ocean bay with phosphorescent plankton, and a plankton blew into your eye and stuck to your contact lens, such a pattern would be not only possible, but expected.
Other possibilities include a semidetached retina (minor retinal damage can cause strange flashies, and yet still repair itself), neural disorders (brain tumors and bloodflow irregularities can cause such visual anomalies), or phosphorescent bacteria actually living inside your eyeball, not to mention a viral optic nerve infection.
Astronauts in orbit have been noted to see gigantic lightning displays in the upper atmosphere, where no such electrical activity has been noted through other means (e.g., ground-based observations or instrumental detection). Such sightings have been attributed to cosmic rays directly stimulating the optic nerves. Of course, such sightings also tend to be a single short-lived blotch rather than a longer-duration zigzag.
Well, other than those, and perhaps the possibility of 9 independant meteorites (5 moving perpendicularly to yourself, and 4 moving directly toward you so as to appear stationary) or the Brownian motion of a very small, very bright meteorite... ok, I'm kidding about that one, but perhaps it could be the Cerenkov radiation of a hitherto-unknown hyper-lightspeed massive particle buffeted by weakly-interacting dark matter? That's what I'm betting on...
At any rate, these are all highly plausible scenarios, and it should put your mind at ease that there are so many common, natural phenomena that can explain what you saw, without resorting to crazy sci-fi mumbo-jumbo about UFO's and the light of Venus refracting off swamp gas.
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