Event Locator: Route 152 Ironton (just before most westerly exit)

Date: 3/16/06 (Correction 03/16/07)

Time: 10:30am

Duration: 10-12 minutes

Weather Conditions: cloudy with drizzle

Abstract: Eyewitness reports "It was 3/16/07 on a Friday morning at approximately 10:15am. I saw a bright yellowish, orange football shaped light pulse over western Ironton in Ohio. It was cloudy and raining as I was driving towards the most westerly exit of Ironton, I noticed this bright yellowish orange football shaped light in a horizontal position, low over the most westerly part of Ironton, to the south of the McDonalds' arch.

"I pulled off the second exit, turned left toward the Ironton Hills mall and proceeded to the nearest portion of the mall that would allow me an unobstructed view of the town below me. I thought about getting the attention of the nearest person to me who was a man smoking a cigarette alone. I let him be due to the nature of this situation as he might think I was mentally ill.

"I kept my mind on the task at hand: to get a good photo. I took two photos, one on the horizontal axis and the second on the vertical. I viewed the object through the viewfinder when I took the pictures as I sat in my truck facing the south. I went back to the same exact area at the Ironton Hills mall (about 11:30am), after my appointment, and I could not find what I had seen before. However, I took a third photo of the same area but of course nothing appeared on film.

"After I had the film developed I noticed a strange walnut shaped object in the photo exactly where I had seen the bright pulsing light. I thought the light form would have been captured as I had seen it but the customer service person at the photo kiosk said that if something is too bright for the camera to capture that it will get "white washed out." However, there is a definite object with some surface detail and shape exactly where I had framed the pulsing light next to the McDonalds' arch."

Click here to jump to my synopsis on the mechanisms that mediate invisibility.

Name: Joe (Information on file)

Gender: m

Age: 37

City, State, Zip Code: Huntington,WV 25701

Country: USA

Home Phone: (Information on file)

Reported?: yes, with MUFON but never recieved a follow up

Previous UFO Experience: yes

Additional Witnesses: none

Number of UFOs: 1

Shape: football or oval shape with unaided eye

Color: bright white light w/yellowish orange tinge

Size: medium size car?

Sound: none

Distance: less than one mile

Altitude: 30 feet or less

Direction of Travel: stationary then jumps to my right (Westerly)

Details/Markings: none

UFO:: passive

Did you see any occupants?: no

Photo(s)/Film/Video/Sketch available?: yes

follow-up: 3pm to 9pm EST

My organization has a reputation for being too antiseptic / scientific at times and I guess that is a compliment because that is the way we want to be. If we are ever going to make any headway in this business of analysis and investigation, it will require a close relationship between the reporter (people like you) and the people who try to make some sense of it (people like us).

Some interesting things have come to light (no pun intended). This aspect of our investigation would be largely overlooked by most investigators had it not been for the tiring efforts of scientists like Dr. J. A. Hynek, Richard Haines PhD and physicist Stanton Friedman. There are going to be those who have and/or will receive the Ironville series of images and will be dismissive when examined. Yes, there is always the possibility of a hoax. But that is not the only explanation. When you look below the surface of this thing, look under the hood so to speak, a fascinating set of possibilities begin to emerge. That is that these pictures offer us a look at the radioactive properties of this particular object.

You described an object that was football shaped and very bright (I assume you mean that it had a brilliance that made it look white-hot). Now anything that appears to be that magnitude of brightness would suggest to the average scientist that the glow could be attributed to an energy or radiance suggesting a high temperature Kelvin.

Something entirely different appeared when you got those images developed. If we can rule out err by the developer, and deliberate fabrication from the photographer, then this image is telling us something about its behavior. What you perceived as being very bright now appears to be a brilliance and reflectivity of something altogether different. Now there are several mechanisms that would mediate invisibility of the brilliance of the object and several shades thereof.

The first aspect would be the target itself. A number of drivers could be at play, including a change in the UFOs surface reflection. It may have been emitting radiation at intervals that the eye could not pick up but the camera did. We could add vaporization of the molecular or atomic composition of the surface of the object. There are many more within this category but I just wanted to touch on this briefly.

Are you getting some idea of the complexity this object presents?

Another would be intervening media. The glass of the windshield, the lens of the camera and atmospheric conditions can affect how we view this object. Anything that acts as an absorbent media between your eye and the object could affect the way the camera interprets the light hitting it.

Optical impressions of the object can also change the way we view something. Neurological aspects must also be considered. There are numerous physiology factors that could be at play. The impressions that our mind may have could be quite different than what is actually there. For example, your eyes and the neurological activity that occurs when we view something can affect the interpretation of this UFO.

And this mechanism though poorly understood may have affected the way you saw this object. Some physiological process that could supplant the actual impression the image made in your memory could be perceptual discontinuities in the temporal domain (i.e. an object that was emotionally intense that it could have produced an anticipatory hallucination within the mind itself that could have caused it to seem brighter than it actually was).

These processes and the many shades thereof can affect how we perceive an object at that distance. I believe that you are sincere and actually saw something that was glowing at the time. Why it doesn't appear that way is certainly open for discussion and a matter that is hardly ever explored by your garden variety "UFO investigator." See Mechanisms that Mediate Invisibility by Dr. Richard Haines PhD in OBSERVING UFOs.


^1.In our original release we stated that this object was photographed in W. Virginia. The reporter has updated us on this UFO that was shot in Ohio.

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