A MonsterQuest Look at Unidentified Flying Creatures

Around the world, cameras have been capturing images of a missile like object or creature that appears out of nowhere and disappears in a fraction of a second. Researchers call these creatures Rods and they are described as one to six feet long, with cylindrical bodies, multiple sets of wings or a thin membrane of wings along the whole body, and able to move so fast that they are undetectable to the naked eye. MonsterQuest takes up the search for Rods in the episode entitled “Unidentified Flying Creatures”.

History

On 20 October 2002, photojournalist Brandon Mowry was shooting video footage at an airport in Albany, NY. Mowry did not notice anything strange while shooting the footage but that changed when he reviewed it. On his film, he observed what looked like a winged missile. The object appeared on the film for only a few frames and looked to be very close to an outbound airplane. The object appeared to be very large and fast moving. Mowry was unsure what to make of the film so he showed it to journalist Dan Bazile.

Bazile states that he was unable to determine what the object was so he contacted the airport to inform them of the film. When airport officials were unable to identify the object, they contacted the FBI. Agents from the FBI confiscated the film from the television station. When contacted by MonsterQuest, the FBI said the case is still open and they will not comment on any findings.

There have been similar photos that show these rod objects. In 2003, a rod appears in a Baghdad photo taken after an explosion. Another video from a Swedish military exercise shows a rod near a tank. Many photos of rods seem to occur near military operations. This has led Bazile to believe that rods may be connected to some secret military experiment.

There have been some early rod sightings that occurred without the use of cameras. One thousand year old stone carvings from Argentina appear to show rod images. An 1891 Crawfordville, Indiana newspaper article contains a possible rod sighting. The report states that two men were working outside when they reported seeing what they described as a headless monster about 20 feet long and eight feet wide. The creature had no head or tail and swam through the air with fin like attachments. The newspaper dubbed the creature the “headless monster”. Modern accounts of rods are from film and not observed with the naked eye.

In May of 1999, a broadcast camera from a news helicopter recorded images of rods in Oklahoma City. The helicopter was recording images of an extremely strong F5 tornado that devastated the area. Meteorologist Gary England said that this tornado had some of the strongest winds ever recorded and the object would not have been a known living creature. The cylindrical object in the video appears to be coming out of a cloud and is gone in a few frames.

In November of 1996, extreme cameraman Mark Lichtle was filming base jumping at the Cave of the Swallows in Mexico. The jumpers were jumping from the rim, falling for 4 to 5 seconds, opening their parachutes and landing at the bottom. While filming this extreme sport he did not notice anything.

When his film footage aired on television, Lichtle received a call from Rod researcher Jose Escamilla. Escamilla had noticed numerous rods showing in the cave jumping footage. Lichtle was amazed when he reviewed the film again and could see the rods passing through the 30 frames per second film in five frames. While many skeptics have claimed that rods are merely birds or insects, this film clearly shows birds and insects flying around that appear quite different from the rods.

Perhaps the best rod film comes from a 2005 film that was taken at a cave entrance in China. The film shows a man walking into the cave as a rod flies past his right shoulder and into the cave. In the film the rod changes direction several times. The man and cave surroundings give several good size and distance reference points. The rod appears to be approximately 18 inches long.

Rod researcher Jose Escamilla has collected over 2,000 rod images from around the world. Some images are very old with one from 1910. According to Escamilla, some of the images seem to show the rods phasing in and out of the film. This has led some people to believe that rods are creatures or objects from another dimension.

The Investigation

The MonsterQuest team looked into many of the possible explanations for rods and came to a pretty startling conclusion.


Could the rods be extra dimensional creatures or objects?

Carl Sagan had said that if a fourth dimensional creature existed, it could appear and dematerialize at will in our three dimensional world. Brown University Professor Thomas Bancoff says that it is theoretically possible for beings to cross between dimensions. Any visitor from another dimension would be hard to recognize.



Could the rods be birds?

Review of the rod footage by birder Martha Yuill led her to believe that if rods were birds then it would have to be a hummingbird. Hummingbirds beat their wings at 70 beats per second and footage of them tends to be blurred. The problem that Yuill sees with this theory is that Hummingbirds are only native to the Americas and would not be found in China. This would not explain the cave footage from 2005. She believes that the rods would have to be insects.


Could the rods be insects?

Dr. Robin Wootton from the University Of Exeter School Of Biosciences reviewed rod footage to see if it showed insects. Wootton did not think the rods looked like any known insect but he believed that the pictures of rods look similar to what the early ancestors of winged insects would have looked like. Around 360 million years ago these proto insects glided using movable winglets to stabilize their fall. These early insects have long been extinct and Wootton does not believe that they could exist in the modern world as they were not very developed. Wootton believed that the rods looked and acted more like projectiles than insects.


How did non-modern humans see rods with the naked eye?

Older accounts of rods have witnesses that see them with the naked eye but this does not seem to occur any more. MonsterQuest contacted Professor of Biological Anthropology Dr. Robert Corruccini for a possible explanation. Corruccini believes that the human senses have diminished in the modern era. Eye muscles are not exercised in the same way as they were previously. The reading of print and watching of television may have led to this diminished capacity.

Corruccini states that people in the non-modernized portions of the world have much better eyesight than their western counterparts. Humans that do not read or utilize television have a normal vision of 20-15 as opposed to the normal 20-20 in western society. Non modern humans may have had even had better vision than that. Peripheral vision would also have been better with these humans.

Can a Rod actually fly?

MonsterQuest enlisted the aid of Iowa State University Aerospace Department Professor Dr. Hui Hu to look at the aerodynamic properties of rods. According to Dr. Hu, any object can fly if it enough force is used. It is more a matter of if the lift and drag factors make the object/creature a sensible design.

To check the feasibility of rod flight, Dr. Hu’s team designs two rod models. One model is constructed with the cylindrical body and flexible wings; the other model has the cylindrical body and rigid wings. Both models are tested in a wind tunnel for flight characteristics. The flexible wing design model proves to be extremely unstable and unable to provide constant lift. The rigid wing design remains stable but provides very little lift in proportion to the drag. Neither design proves to be a very good aerodynamic model. They would both require a lot of power to propel through the air.

A possible problem with this experiment is brought up by Dr. Tom Shih of Iowa State University. If the creature or object shown in the film is actually from another dimension, we may not be seeing the complete object in our dimension. We would probably be testing only a portion of the object in the wind tunnel so the test would not be valid.

Is the camera lying?

High speed camera expert Peter Schmitz sets up an experiment involving the filming of insects. He places a regular speed camera that records at 30 frames per second and a high speed camera that records at 500 frames per second to record the same area. An electronic display is set up to provide an exact time reference for both sets of film. They film an area at night with a floodlight in order to attract insects. Eventually, they capture the image of a rod on the normal speed camera when they saw nothing out of the ordinary with the naked eye. The rod captured on film looks very similar to those captured on the different films from around the world.

When the high speed camera footage is reviewed for the same time period, it clearly shows that the rod was a moth moving in front of the camera. Some type of distortion in the normal speed film caused the moth to look like a cylindrical object with multiple wings. Camera Engineer Mike Bergeron explains that any camera is capable of producing what is called artifacts. These artifacts are distorted and blurred images that are created as the camera captures multiple images of the same object on the same frame. These distorted objects would appear much differently on film than they would have in real life. When an object moves across the camera lens field at a distance that is less than the distance to the object the camera is focused on, there is a chance the camera will capture the closer object as an extremely blurred fast moving object. These artifacts do not appear all the time as it takes the proper combination of object speed, distance from the camera, light, and shutter speed to make them appear. Any type of object could cause this type of phenomenon including insects, birds, or flying debris.

Conclusion

I believe the MonsterQuest team did a great job explaining these sightings. The footage of the moth looked very much like the footage of the rods. They were also able to give sample footage of known objects making other types of rod shaped objects. I would have to say that the camera artifact argument makes much more sense than any other argument in the case of rods.