UFO videos captured this Saturday near Cincinnati, Ohio show blinking red and white lights floating across the sky. Some have suggested these, and other recent similar videos, are Chinese Lanterns, but the witness in Cincinnati is certain what he caught was much more mysterious.
According to the website WMD, John Maisel spotted the lights at 9:45 pm along with about 20 of his neighbors in Greenhill, Ohio, which is about 20 miles north of Cincinnati. They described the lights as red and white lights floating over their homes. In the video they speculate that the lights could be drones, rockets, angels, or aliens.
Maisel told WMD, “We saw over a period of 15 to 20 minutes at least 14 of these and I was able to record three of them. Each came from the same place on the northern horizon, flew south until they hit between 90 and 120 degrees and then disappeared.”
He said the lights moved in a “smooth straight line,” and were completely silent. One after another they would move across the sky for 1.5 to 2 minutes before “blinking out.”
Given Maisel’s description and the video, some have suggested that what he and his neighbor witnessed were Chinese Lanterns. There is nothing to suggest otherwise. On the video one neighbor shouts, “It looks like there is fire coming out of it! I’ve got binoculars right here!”
However, Maisel disagrees with the Chinese Lantern theory. He says, “I’ve spent time through my years watching shooting stars and satellites fly overhead and I’d say given my best estimate they were roughly between airline height and satellite height, a big variation. They certainly were not hundreds of feet off the ground. More like thousands.”
He says they also flew too fast to be Chinese lanterns. He explained, “The video doesn’t reflect this since I’m zoomed in.”
He also said, unlike Chinese Lanterns, they were flying against the wind. He says, “They flew from the Northeast to the Southwest and I confirmed with the National Weather Service that our winds at that time were gentle – 7 mph – from the West/Southwest.”
WMD found another possible cause for the lights when they contacted Middletown Regional Airport, just north of Greenhills. Airport manager Todd Johnson told WMD that were illuminated skydiving going on that night. Johnson said, “We did night jumps on the 26th and we were doing pyrotechnics training.”
Johnson says the skydiving team, Team Fastrax, often gets mistaken for UFOs. Maisel says he hopes this is what it was, but he is still skeptical. He says, “These flew from the horizon and then directly overhead. The referenced video did not zoom in. I was zoomed in the whole time and the sphere shape seems pretty clear. Additionally, they would have been going towards a city/residential area. I am open to an explanation.”
WMD notes that there have been other cases in the near future of similar UFO videos that were suspected to be UFOs, but the witnesses insisted were not. In particular, they cite a story from the Huffington Post in August, 2013 written by Lee Speigel. In this story two similar videos are scrutinized.
The first was from late July, 2013 captured in Tucson, Arizona. One witness wrote on YouTube, “My family and I witnessed these strange amber lights in Tucson on our way home from dinner. There were seven or eight of them crossing the sky, some solo and others in pairs flying very, very close together.”
The witness says the objects moved “very fast” and silently.
The other was from Kansas City, captured on July 27, 2013. The YouTuber who posted the video of the objects, exclaimed, “Looks like a ufo fleet….!!!? (sic)” Again, the video shows orange-colored lights that move silently across the sky.
Former FBI agent, and host of the SyFy Channel’s Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, told the Huffington Post, “In my opinion both videos are definitely man-made, combustible objects — most likely Chinese lanterns”
“Both videos are consistent with the characteristics of ground-launched, fire-lit objects. In the last five years, we’ve seen an exponential increase in the use of Chinese lanterns and similar lighter-than-air objects launched as hoaxes or as part of celebrations,” Hansen continued. “If you’ve never seen them in the sky before, the experience can be quite stunning to the casual observer.”
hi my name is Adam Gardner I live in a suburb of Cincinnati and i to seen these same ufos. I seen them about 2 days prior to this date that you seen them and they were doing the same thing I saw many of them the one I saw that was the most clear visible to me was low I mean low the other ones that were farther up much higher but I seen the same exact things you saw it was about 4:30 in the morning when I seen them so they could not have been Chinese lanterns