While I was in London I read the daily "Metro" paper and thought it was pretty good. But I guess they stoop to conquer as well; yesterday they ran a story with the headline "Fighter jet hits UFO".
Assuming the story is true, something hit a Romanian MiG 21′s windshield during a training flight, forcing the pilot to land. It’s not identified what it was — but an investigation shows it wasn’t a bird, ice, or a meteorite.
So now you may be all pedantic if you want and say, "but if it’s not identified than it really is a UFO!" True, and you can also get all pedantic and say, "UFO doesn’t mean alien spaceship!" Also true.
But then why did the Metro run this picture next to the article? 
Grrrrr.
Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Kevin Conod.
June 11th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
It occurred on a training flight above Transylvania.
Perhaps it was a vampire bat.
June 11th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Excuse me. I have to bash my head violently into that wall over there.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
and I still hear ads for that “star registry” scam operation on my local radio, complete with Library of Congress nonsense.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
It was Vlad the impaler of windshields that is.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Two aluminum pie tins stapled together and flung into the air: 1
Romanian MiG-21s: 0
June 11th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Maybe it was hit by a discus. The Olympics are coming up…
June 11th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
it hit a wok?
June 11th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Well, it had to be something? Why not blame it on a technologically advanced race that has the ability to travel hundreds of light years, navigate through asteroid belts, avoid the perils of deep space, only to smack into a piece if outdated Soviet era 1970′s technology? It makes perfect sense to me.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Looks like the alien spacecraft was considerably smaller than the MiG windshield. I, for one, am not worried by tiny aliens.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
There was a time I had a sense of humor about that sort of thing, and I guess I still do to a point, but damn my eyes, even off-handed pseudoscience is starting to raise my cackles!
BTW, love your blog. Long time reader, first time commenter : )
June 11th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Well,
you did say “it wasn’t a bird, ice, or a meteorite”. I don’t see *anything* about hubcaps in that list.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Metro used to have Judge Dredd comics in it too.
That is all.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Well, Transylvania. That means it’s beyond our human science.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Maybe it was one of these.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Yes, and why did the Arcturus Herald post a picture of a fighter jet next to the article about the saucer that got hit?
June 11th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
See here for a video of it – looks like typical UFO crap – three blobs hitting aircraft.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0scJShhQ3Q
June 11th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
It wasn’t a bird or a bat.
It was realy a Terradactyl.
June 11th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Why is it that whenever someone takes blurred footage of something, the immediately claim “Aliens!”?
I take blurry footage of all sorts of things all the time but I don’t automatically assume its extraterrestrial in origin. In fact, I usually assume its my thumb I’ve managed to capture – again.
June 11th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I was really curios on the time it takes for an ridiculous story to get out of the Romanian media… into the world.
this is like a week or so old…
the guys from the military are just saying that they could not find any explanation for the presence of those small objects that hit the MIG
(romanian MIGs 21 are very prone to all sorts of accidents…. lost half of the fleet in the last 10 years… so we can replace them with the “modern” F16… second-hand)
than of course the romanian media just printed UFO and flying saucers everywhere.
Now the tinfoil hat people have their “evidence”.
(my theory: ice from an airliner carried by the wind into the “military exclusion zone)
June 11th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Am I the only person who thinks the term UFO is a really poor misnomer?
I mean, Venus accounts for many UFO sightings, and it isn’t generally considered flying. Meteorites don’t fly either. Something like this likely would likely have been a falling object, rather than flying, as well. (Yes, I know, flight is a very finely controlled fall)
And if you can’t see the object clearly enough to identify it, how do you actually know it’s flying? The use of the term UFO itself sort of implies this implicit knowledge that the object in question is in flight.
June 11th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Metro has a pretty good and mostly accurate science section, but I guess there’s still a few journalists around that have done their apprenticeship at The Sun, Nuts or worse…
June 11th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
But then why did the Metro run this picture next to the article?
Because journalists are often quite dumb.
And I know what I’m talking about: I used to be one.
June 11th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
“… but due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle-fleet was swallowed by a small dog.”
June 11th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
I can’t believe nobody has said it yet. Oh well…
“I, for one, welcome our tiny alien overlords.”
There, now I can read the next post.
June 11th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Meet’s tiny alien overlord:
“Aye, you’re a wee little fellah!”
BZzzzzzzzzaappppppp! Sizzle, sizzle.
Apparently out little alien overlords are a touch sensitive about size.
June 11th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
“romanian MIGs 21 are very prone to all sorts of accidents…. lost half of the fleet in the last 10 years”… I so agree with danezia. A couple of years (well, decades) ago, we had the rather interesting phenomenon of F-104s dropping from the sky for no obvious reason at all… for a couple of years, the cheapest way to get your very own starfighter was to buy an acre of land in Lower Saxony, Germany, and wait for some days; one of those over-priced killing machines was going to crash on it. Some of the losses were due to pilot errors, and most of were them due to the fact that the F-104 was a piece of junk with wings, but, and now it gets interesting, sometimes the Luftwaffe pilots had to do emergency landings because they suddenly looked through shattered cockpit canopies. Turned out they hit a lonely tiny little piece of ice (hail, that is) at supersonic speed. Strange objects, indeed: “Romanian defence ministry officials have ruled out all normal types of collision such as birdstrikes, ice or small meteorites.” Now I wonder how exactly they can rule ‘em out, and I want to see the recordings of the “in-flight video camera”, before I believe even a tiny bit of this woo.
June 11th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
the canadian version of f-104 the cf104 was nicknamed the lawndart or widowmaker.
June 11th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
The object in the photo is no longer unidentified. It is an inverted pie tin. I have seen it many times.
June 11th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
My first thought was ice. How could they rule out ice? Birdies would leave gunk behind but ice is just… water.
Unless he hit Venus.
June 11th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Why did they post the picture next to the article? Have you not heard of “sensationalism?” Is there never an example of “yellow journalism?”
Then we have to take into account the British press. An odd lot, those Brits. Was this story next to the “Page Two Girl?”
BTW, I think I read something about this on the Internet, oh, maybe two months ago. It is not new news, or for that matter news at all.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
@acj
Check the youtube link below, and skip to about 40 seconds in – there’s your cockpit footage. Blurry black smudges flying past the plane – ergo, they must be aliens. Not sure how they made that particular leap of faith.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0scJShhQ3Q
June 11th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
shane, the ice is probably travelling faster then the average bird dropping also it probably has more mass so the kinetic energy would be higher.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Hold on, checking the “Sensationalist’s Rule Book”…let me see….here we go “Any blurry footage of an unknown object – Ratings Rank: 5 (to gain a +2 multiplier to score, claim it’s a UFO)”
June 11th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
davidlpf, do you mean bird droppings or a dropping bird?
If the canopy was smashed it would have to be something solid-ish. Ice might smash something and leave no evidence behind. A bird, not droppings, would leave blood, tissue, feather bits etc. So that is what I meant by how can they rule out ice?
June 11th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Romanian bugs are really, really tough.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
I meant bird droppings, i thought that is what you meant. my bad.
June 11th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
And lets not forget “USO’s” (unidentified submerged objects). The Shag Harbor incident, etc. Nuclear subs patrolling everywhere are mum tho.
June 11th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
“Romanian defence ministry officials have ruled out all normal types of collision such as birdstrikes, ice or small meteorites.”
Being hit by small meteorites is normal? Only in Transylvania!
–HH
June 11th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
sci_tchron wrote:
“The object in the photo is no longer unidentified. It is an inverted pie tin. I have seen it many times.”
Maybe the MiG got hit with an inverted pie tin then. Difficult to explain how it got all the way up there…but likely more plausible than an alien artifact.
June 12th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Posted this link in http://www.surfurls.com .Its a social bookmarking site.
June 12th, 2008 at 1:40 am
Well to rule out ice, or any possible debris from a plane – pro’lly the only source of ice at 6500m/20000ft and above – you’ll have to check the records and see any plane routes around there at the time of the incident.
Any other plane in the area at that time, give or take a few minutes would have showed up on ground radar.
If it didn’t, therefore no plane and no ice.
Unless it’s a stealth plane (wink-wink)
June 12th, 2008 at 1:43 am
Aliens! To you, it’s always aliens. Remember the time we used an entire bog roll in one day? Aliens!
June 12th, 2008 at 2:19 am
Nox: “Am I the only person who thinks the term UFO is a really poor misnomer?”
Indeed not, the preferred term among serious researchers is UAP — for Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomena. And yes, there are serious researchers here in the UK, rather than the “ET is real and so is Majestik 12″ crowd that seem most vocal in the US. For example Jenny Randles, who has tentatively identified the cause of “UK’s Roswell” — the Rendlesham Forest incident — as misidentification of a local light-house.
Sorry, minor bugbear of mine, but not everyone interested in anomalous phenomena is automatically a woo-believing nutcase.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:07 am
I wouldn’t be too impressed by Metro – it’s purely a vehicle for advertising. Don’t expect anything approaching journalism in it. I was living in London when it first appeared and it only took me a couple of days of reading it each morning on the Tube to realise that the “journalists” just spend the day browsing the web and copy/pasting whatever sensationalist rubbish they can find for publication the next day.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:16 am
Just to clarify a point, the “Metro” is as close to your “National Enquirer” as the British press can stoop. If it was “pretty good” on the day(s) you read it, then there really something spooky going on.
June 12th, 2008 at 5:14 am
The Sport was worse, at least in the days when it pretended to be more than a listing of premium rate pron phone lines…
June 12th, 2008 at 5:53 am
I couldn’t let this pass: The Metro is a rag. It has amongst other things a column callled “microcosm” which is filled with three or four stories from New Scientist. Which are usually only 10% true. The rest of it includes stories like “ghost girl causes car crashes” on every other page.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:26 am
I’m no fan of Metro, but it’s free, and it’s miles better than The London Paper or London Lite. It’s not much worse than the Evening Standard, but that’s not saying much these days.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:55 am
‘While I was in London I read the daily “Metro” paper and thought it was pretty good.’ As we’d say over here—do me a favour, Phil! How disappointing that even you could be beguiled by this awful excuse for journalism. The Metro is a mind-rotting entertainment magazine pure and simple. It is also a daily environmental disaster on a metropolitan scale.
June 12th, 2008 at 8:43 am
The English always act like they are so culturally superior to
everyone else, especially the Americans, but judging by their
newspapers they like to wallow in the same dreck as everyone
else.
How refreshing.
June 12th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
MarkW:
Heard that explanation before, and to be honest, it’s a little weak. I’m not saying I believe it is ET, but that explanation doesn’t hold water.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
[...] ???? [...]
June 19th, 2008 at 2:50 am
It is a set up of Romanian DoD. Nothing hits the airplane. Was only a very old cannopy wich was very stressed and broken. Read the point of view of an Romanian high skill ex-pilot of MIG-21 (V.V ) : http://www.rufon.org/forum/index.php/topic,1530.90.html