So you’ve got two sightings. One with one adult and two children. In the second sighting, we have five adults and multiple kids between the ages of 7 and 13. In the second sighting, the ‘whatever’ flew directly over the house. Five adults stood stunned, and all of them would swear that they just saw a freaking pterodactyl.
Considering that it happened in the desert, not a place that one would typically expect to find a water bird, and the angle of the sun made a perfect silhouette and (in both cases) we only had two - maybe three seconds - to get a look before it was gone - the whole situation made identification difficult.
This is very close to what we saw.
Put the legs together so that it creates the illusion of a tail, change the angle slightly so that the feathers aren’t discernible and it made the picture complete.
Now, I ask you, which assumption is more reasonable? That we saw a migrating heron that was attracted to our pool or that multiple witnesses saw a pterodactyl?
All I’m saying is that our eyes and our brains play tricks on us. The only reason that I dug so deep into our experience is that, by all accounts, we saw a freaking pterodactyl flying around the desert. It made no damn sense. The heron is the most logical explanation. I’ve found much better photos than the one I posted and everyone who was there accepts this as the reality.
(Here’s a laugh for you. I just googled heron and pterodactyl and found numerous photographs and accounts of others making the same mistake. Even an article about how much a heron resembles the prehistoric bird. Another article explaining that the two aren’t related. There’s a couple of good pictures where a heron does indeed resemble a pterodactyl.)
All I’m saying is that our eyes and our brains play tricks on us.
That's very true. Deeply ingrained expectations also make us vulnerable to illusion and deception.
I've never seen anything I thought (for long, anyway!) was a UFO machine of other-planetary origin, and hope I live to ripe old age that way.
People are smart enough, as you were, to understand and figure out when there is a logical explanation for what they saw. You're not the only one.
There are times when people see things that flatly, plainly, fall outside the purview of optical or psychological tricks. They know it, they experienced it, and they know others are secretly thinking, "Well, that's just because he/she isn't smart enough, like I have been, to figure out what it really was. Depend upon it, it was very much like my experience."
In many ways, it is insulting and arrogant. But not quite so bad as the condescending, "Well, I believe that the person really believes that's what she saw," which is just passive-aggressive for, "I think the person is too nutty to comprehend what he/she actually saw because there's no such thing as a flying saucer."
It isn't really about whether one "believes" in flying saucers and UFOs and extra-terrestrials.
It's about what one believes about his fellow humans. It's deductive reasoning that some very material manifestation of "flying saucers" exists if only because so many through the ages have described it.
Now you can choose to believe that your fellow humans are much beneath you in that they either lie, or are too simple to perceive that the sophisticated looking, nimble craft they saw, was really just a trick of the mind.
Or you can choose to believe the more frightening alternative.
Which one is more reasonable?
