Comets and UFOs

Well, there has been great media exposure of the press conference in Washington last Monday Nov 12th. Just google for 'pilots call for ufo' and you'll get hundreds of hits - that's the Reuters report echoed around countless web sites of newspapers, blogs etc. Only a few are different - e.g. BBC. But most re-cycle the same story. Ridiculously, showing how little research these TV and newspaper people do, many of the reports showed an image of a flying disk saying it was investaged by the SSE in 1998 or more honestly, date unknown. A tiny bit of surfing and I had it -

Yes, it was the good old Vancouver Island, British Columbia, 1981 case.

Funnily enough, whilst looking for the comet last week, I saw a few things I couldn't be sure were kosher: First, looking into the eastern sky, partly clouded, suddenly a bright yellow light, bigger than a planet and brighter, shot behind a cloud and disappeared behind another one. If it was a meteor, it was the brightest one I've ever seen - it could have been a fireball: or something else. Insufficient data. Similarly, a few minutes later (it was a funny evening) looking to the Northeast, another brightish light came out of the clouds and then appeared to do aU-turn and dive back into them. It was a matter of a few seconds, so I couldn't be sure it wasn't just a plane appearing through a gap in the clouds momentarily. But simething about the thinness of hte clouds seemed to rule that out. Phew! Got it off my chest. Probably both mundane... still it was amusing to see 2 slightly weird things whilst scanning for the comet.