June 18/19th 2004

For the last couple of years I've been interested in the phenomenon known as Rods or Skyfish. On the evening of June 18th '04 I had the opportunity to try and see if anything could be seen by using my friends camcorder to film the sky with the sun backlite behind his neighbors roof facing West. It was around 8:30pm and the sun was getting rather low. There was little wind with a scattering of clouds. At first I could see nothing but then I started to zoom out. At around 35x I started to seeing these glowing objects zipping around in a playful manner. I placed the camcorder on a tripod zooming out to 40x and let the tape roll. In doing this I made two mistakes in using the camcorder. Never go above the optical zoom and set the focas manualy. I also made these mistakes with the June 19th footage. I use to earn a living video taping weddings and some local sporting events so I should have known better. After about 15 minutes I took the camcorder into the house and downloaded the footage into the computer. At that time I did not view the footage, I just finished downloading and placed the camera on recharge and went back outside.

A couple of days before this a bunch of us were over at my friends helping him rebuild his deck. On the 19th of June I was back to help with some of the finishing touches such as the railings etc. We took a break around 2:30pm so I grabed his camcorder again and set it up on the tripod facing south at about a 65 degree angle toward his roof some 20 feet above us. I then zoomed out to 40x and let the tape roll for about 45 minutes with the odd adjustment so the sun never shone into the lens. Afterwards I took the camera and again using his computer started to download whatever was on the tape. About 3 minutes into the download my friend got a call from work and had to go. I stoped downloading and saved what I had.

I never got around to viewing what I had caught on tape for a couple of days and when I did it was only for about 20 minutes and was not sure what I was seeing. I was going over the June 18th footage frame by frame when I started to see things happening that were not noticable when seen at regular speed. Objects turning at right angles, slowing down then speeding up, doing things aircraft can not do. None of these objects could be seen with the naked eye as they were quite far away. At the time I still did not know what I had caught on the June 19th footage and never thought about saving the actual tape in the camera. A couple days later my friend took his camcorder to his family reunion and taped over what I had taped. It was 3 weeks till I had the time to go over the saved footage from June 19th frame by frame.

In the two+ minutes of footage that was saved there are at least a couple hundred objects zooming by in just that one little patch of sky. I know there were objects ziping around for the whole 45 minutes I had taped. They were traveling in a East to West direction and went right over our airport yet I have no idea if the radar saw them or not. In that footage was one clear shot of whatever was transversing the sky. What was in the remaining footage I never downloaded I'll never know.