Breaking News Balloons Seen Over Manhattan

Perhaps you saw the news stories: "A mysterious shiny object floating high over Manhattan's West Side set off a flurry of reports and wild speculation Wednesday that a UFO was flying over the city. Police and the FAA said they began getting flooded with calls starting at 1:30 p.m. from people reporting a silvery object hovering high over Chelsea."

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny local/2010/10/13/2010-10-13 mystery shiny objects floating over manhattan spark ufo frenzy.html"It's been hovering there for a while. I'm just kind of baffled," said Joseph Torres, 49, of Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, who spotted the object after leaving a movie. "How can it be ordinary? There is something going on."

Come on, folks. Have we been fed so many UFO promotions that every time we see some little thing in the sky, we immediately jump to the conclusion that it's some mysterious phenomenon?

Then some people remembered an obscure prediction by retired Air Force officer Stanley A. Fulham, who predicted that huge ships would be seen hovering over cities worldwide on Oct. 13, and began tweeting this sighting widely. Obviously, balloons seen in the sky = a fleet of spaceships.

On one of the videos posted of the object, an observer can actually be heard saying repeatedly, "they're balloons." And balloons indeed they were, according to

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny local/2010/10/14/2010-10-14 ufo nyc kids say no mysterious floating orbs were escaped balloons from teachers.html"A Westchester elementary school believes the puzzling orbs floating over Chelsea were likely a bundle of balloons that escaped from an engagement party they held for a teacher... A parent was bringing about 40 iridescent pearl balloons to the school for language arts teacher Andrea Craparo when the wind spent a bunch away around 1 p.m."

But some commentators, like this guy on extraordinaryintelligence.com, aren't buying the balloon explanation: "I was there. It was very unsettling to watch. There's no rational explanation to that spectacle in the sky. They stood together, in the same relative position to each other - you could call it a formation - and in the same spot in the sky, with very minimal movement for a long time. Small bright perfectly formed dots, against a perfectly blue sky. Surreal."

And remember the First Rule of UFOlogy: any time you see something in the sky that you can't immediately identify, assume it's an alien spaceship until conclusively proven otherwise.