General Discussion

Is Elijah returning, with an army of angels in aircraft?

Or, since this is the Christmas season, could the Nativity angels who appeared to the shepherds be returning for a reenactment?

Hope it's not the Rapture.

I do not doubt people who report seeing an unidentified object in the sky. But, to me, the significant word in that phrase is "unidentified." Why can't we accept that we don't know what something is, without assuming the most esoteric explanation?

It's natural to speculate. But one of the lessons that I learned from high school geometry was to accept that sometimes there is not enough knowledge given in a problem to establish a proof, i.e. to determine the size of an angle, or the perimeter of a shape. The correct answer to such questions on a test was "insuficient information."

When I was 19, I had a second floor apartment in an old house which had been divided up into rental units. Sometimes in the evening when my roommate was out, I heard sounds coming from a small room that we used for storage. We had a puppy who noticed it too, and would bark at the door to the room.

An old couple next door told me that the original owner of our building had killed herself. We told our friends about this and they suggested that the deceased woman haunted our apartment. They brought a Ouija board over and got answers that fit their idea.

A whole story evolved out of that. The woman who had died had a young son at the time, who was an adult by the time we rented our apartment. Our friends said that her spirit must be seeking out her son. They led us to the room to tell the woman's spirit that her son was doing well and she could leave.

A couple nights later, the puppy was barking up a storm at the door and I heard sounds in the room. When I peaked inside, a black starling was perched on a tall floor lamp just below the ceiling. I moved the puppy away from the door and when I looked back, the bird had disappeared.

Next day, the maintenance manager looked into it. There was a small trap door in the ceiling that led to an attic from when the building was a one family home. We had never used it or even opened the trap door. The maintenance guy found a small eroded space in the ceiling tile adjacent to the trap door. Inside the attic crawl space, he found bird droppings and a space under the building's eaves where the starling apparently got into the attic.

Poof! There went the elaborate, esoteric haunting story.