Reactions and comments about the 2011 Canadian UFO Survey

Reactions are about as expected to the 2011 Canadian UFO Survey. Hard-core buffs think we're being too conservative, and debunkers are just scoffing.

We just go with the "Joe Friday" treatment.

One thing I should elaborate on is the one case I describe from St. Catharines, where a "grapefruit-sized" object flew very close to a witness.

The Yahoo story quoted me as saying:

a man reported seeing a grapefruit-sized object circling around a hydro pole before flying toward him, missing him by as little as two metres, before disappearing.

The Winnipeg Sun had the longer quote:

In St. Catharines, Ont., in early February, a man reported seeing a beige object -- the size and shape of a grapefruit -- circling high around a hydro pole before it stopped and then flew toward him, missing him by about two metres, before he lost sight of it.

Among the comments to the Yahoo story was the following:

Markku  •  Surrey, British Columbia  

the grapefruit sized object could have been a plasma ball , from a power bump in the electrical system . Similar object can be made by giant tesla coils and are completely natural. In the case of a Hydro Pole there is a lot of cable up there long enough to create an inductance at high frequencies if there is a power bump, and cause a plasma discharge to occur. That is my theory, and I am sticking to it.

However, I had the opportunity to speak with this witness at length, and he was insistent that this was not a plasma discharge, which is typically blue in colour and intense, but a physical "opaque" object that had form and was beige or brown.

Someone who had personal experience with plasmas in the field emailed me:

When I heard the bit about the beige ring spinning around the hydro wires, I immediately thought of the insulator rings that are used on some hydro poles.  When I worked at [a TV station], we would occasionally be on-site for "pole fires" - and those things could be weird (electricity like lightning moving along the outside of the wire, insulators blowing up, etc.).

He added:

The lightning things that I saw skipped along the outside of the wire and were, as you say, bluish-white, like regular lightning - in fact, they looked exactly like lightning - but moving horizontally along the outside of the wire , but when the insulators blew up, they changed color to more like orange.  For safety purposes, curious by-standers were kept at bay (on the next block) by the police, because when the insulators blew up there was no predicting in which direction they would fly, and they could go several hundred feet at high speed. I only saw one, that was a little smaller than a Frisbee (say, 6 inches in diameter) shoot about 100 feet and hit a fence. If that thing had hit a person, it would have surely caused injury, or death (depending on where it hit). 

So, if it wasn't a plasma discharge or an insulator, what was it?