UFO SIGHTING IN KOLKATA

A WHITE dazzling fireball streaked across the dark sky over Kolkata in the wee hours of Tuesday, dancing as it were, emanating myriad colours, and leaving many Kolkatans who saw it, agape. It hung in the skies for roughly three hours, allowing an intrepid photographer to take video clips spanning the entire period of time. The Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) was shown on a regional TV channel.

The clip filmed on a handy cam, taken by Farhan Akhtar, a senior executive of a private company, was shown to the MP Birla Planetarium director D P Duari who said the flying object, seen “at 30 degrees on the eastern horizon” was “interesting and strange”. He appeared on TV along with Akhtar who narrated what he saw.

The fireball, on which the handy cam zoomed into, appeared to be circular. It was now white, now green, now purple – now red. It moved from east to west changing its shape rapidly from a circle to a triangle and then a straight line. On the video clip, at one stage it distinctly looked like a flying saucer -- a circular disc with studs on it.

Quite a few others spotted the strange object in the eastern sky and hundreds gathered along Eastern Metropolitan Bypass craning their necks to look at extraterrestrial object sending them into a tizzy.

Akhtar had got up at the ungodly hour to close a window and pull the drapes after his wife started feeling cold. He first thought it was an airplane and then thought it was a star. Deciding to take a closer look he reached for his handy cam and zoomed in and tracked it for three hours on a tripod because his hands were shaking. The object was visible even after daylight broke. It disappeared at around 6.30 a.m.

“No natural phenomenon is likely to last for such a long duration and it is not a meteor either. It is an extremely interesting and strange object,” Duari told the TV channel.
Scientists are star gazers are mystified by the phenomenon.

”A cosmic body cannot change its appearance the way this one seemed to do. But an expert needs to observe it for a longer period of time to be able to comment on it. It is very strange and intriguing. Sadly, TV pictures are not enough to come to a conclusion,” Kamalesh Kar, astro-particle physicist at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physic told a section of the Kolkata press.