Although his email address suggests that “Sasquatch lives,” an Oak Harbor man has abandoned any pursuit of the big-footed one to focus his camera on strange blinky lights in the heavens.
In recent weeks, Joe Cardinal has taken a series of photos of unusually shaped objects, including lights that look like perfect triangles and constipated worms, in the night sky over the city. One looked like a “hat with a window in it,” he said.
“Maybe they want to abduct me,” he joked, “and change my name to Goodspaceguy.”
Although the blurry images aren’t exactly groundbreaking, Cardinal is just one of the many people who have reported seeing unidentified objects over Whidbey Island and surrounding areas in the last year.
In fact, an uptick in UFO sightings coincided with the pandemic, for an unclear reason.
The National UFO Reporting Center has suggested that many such sightings — particularly those of lights in a line across the sky — could be Elon Musk’s fault; SpaceX has been sending hundreds of the Starlink satellites into orbit over the last two years.
Then again, the Department of Defense has been candid over the last couple of years about mysterious UFOs being witnessed by military and civilian pilots across the world. The Navy released video of encounters between Navy aircraft and “unidentified aerial phenomenon.”
Then on Monday, a series of national news agencies reported that a newly unclassified government report on UFOs will be released this summer. A former top national intelligence official said it will include information that is “difficult to explain.”
Whidbey residents have posted at least a couple of videos of UFOs on social media in the last week. One was a time-lapsed video of Deception Pass that showed something streaking across the sky.
Another video showed lights seemingly flying in formation before suddenly disappearing over Coupeville at dusk. People suggested that they may have been radar targeting spheres, drones, satellites or aliens.
One of the most fantastical reports in years occurred on April 20, 2020.
Four witnesses in Oak Harbor, two of whom were described as “highly trained military officers,” reported seeing an unidentified object in the night sky that wasn’t an aircraft — or at least not one known to humankind, according to the report to the Mutual UFO Network.
Witnesses said they saw an orange glowing circle that hovered, made abrupt course changes and varied its speed over about three hours.
The report said the witnesses stated the object appeared “as distant as any star.”
Other reports over the last year included a hovering and spinning light seen in Langley Aug. 11.
Two days later, an Oak Harbor resident reported seeing about 30 oval lights flying in “two abreast trail formation” west to east in the sky at about 5:17 a.m. — which conforms to descriptions of the Starlink satellites.
Several UFO reports were also made in Anacortes and the Kitsap Peninsula over the last few years.
On May 6, witnesses in Anacortes, for example, reported that a “translucent glowing worm” with lighted segments hovered in the heavens and suddenly went dark.
