It's a bird! It's a plane! No...

Thanks to my friend, the ever-sharp-eyed author Gil Miller, I now have a giant bruise in the middle of my forehead from doing facepalms.

Gil's contribution to my ongoing struggle against brain damage came about because of a website called The Living Sky, wherein we're told that there is a "new scientific answer to the mystery of UFOs."  Naturally eager to find out what this "scientific answer" might be, I started poking around the site, figuring I'd find that despite the word "new," it'd turn out to be the usual stuff about alien visitations and spaceships and faster-than-light travel.

Nope.

UFOs, we are told, aren't super-high-tech crafts that have crossed interstellar space to visit a planet that, frankly, more resembles a cosmic lunatic asylum than anywhere I'd want to visit.  UFOs aren't, in fact, crafts of any kind.

They're...

... lord have mercy, I'm having a hard time even writing this...

... they're sky jellyfish.

Well, that is new, I have to admit.

I wish I was making this up.  But wait... they have proof!  Here it is:

Welp, I dunno about you, but I'm convinced.

Oh, but not all of them are sky jellyfish.  Some of them are flying squid.

The... um, logic... goes something like this.

Marine invertebrates are some of the most common life forms on Earth.  They come in all shapes and sizes, and are "ideally suited to move in a fluid habitat."  Which, I think we can all agree, is lucky for them.

Many marine invertebrates have appendages like flaps, tentacles, and tails.  Some are bioluminescent.  Some are venomous, and encounters with them can cause injury or (in extreme cases) death.

The atmosphere is sometimes called "an ocean of air."

Okay, how about UFOs?

UFOs have been spotted in all shapes and sizes, move around quickly, and often have lights and what appear to be appendages.  Some people who have had close encounters with UFOs have sustained injuries.  The parallels are obvious

Also, one mustn't forget that crop circles are circular (as advertised), as are jellyfish.

So q.e.d., as far as I can see.

I should also mention that the site includes pages about "aerobiology" and "aerial plankton."

The whole thing reminded me (rather reluctantly) of the first episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Encounter at Farpoint."  I have to admit it had its moments -- notably, introducing John de Lancie as Q -- but the downside was the rather ridiculous premise of a base on a planet that turned out to be an unlimited energy source because it was actually alive.  When Jean-Luc Picard et al. figure this out, and stop the evil base administrator from taking advantage of the creature's powers, it lifts off, and reveals itself as...

... you guessed it...

a Sky Jellyfish.

Me, I thought this was fiction, but what the hell do I know.

What strikes me about all this is that apparently the Living Sky people took a look at the aliens-and-spaceships claims, and said, "Nope.  That's not nearly loony enough.  Let's jettison the whole idea of technology entirely, and blame the whole phenomenon on flying squid."

I dunno, dude.  I've yet to see a crazy idea that becomes more plausible when you add stuff to it that makes it even crazier.

Anyhow, that's our dip into the deep end for today.  Just keep yourself alert, okay?  If you see any suspicious tentacles coming out of the sky toward you, seek shelter immediately.  I hear those things can pack a nasty sting.

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The attack of the sky jellyfish

After recent posts about the state of education in the United States, the role of religion in politics, and the validity of non-Western approaches to medicine, it's high time we turn our eyes to more serious and pressing topics, namely:  giant invisible sky monsters terrorizing Japan.

Enter Brent Swancer, writer for the site Cryptomundo.  Cryptomundo is not only one of the world's leading sources for breaking news regarding creatures that probably don't exist, it is also one of the only places where you can buy a Sasqwatch, which is a wristwatch with a band shaped like a huge, hairy foot, and has a Bigfoot on the dial whose arms move to tell you the time.  I must point out at this juncture that my birthday is coming up soon, and I don't currently own a Sasqwatch.  So if you're looking for ideas, you might want to take that into consideration.

Be that as it may, Swancer has written an exposé regarding recent events in Japan, and it makes quite a story.  His article (which you can read in its entirety here) describes the upswing in weird events following the Japanese tsunami.  These include "strange flying anomalies" of various shapes.  Swancer looks first at the idea that these might be alien spacecraft, but then dismisses that notion; just because you see something odd in the sky, he says, you shouldn't jump to the conclusion that they're aliens.  No, you should jump to an entirely different conclusion: that they're giant flying monsters.

Wait, you may be saying; why, if there are giant flying monsters up there in the air, don't we see them more often?  Well, first, they fly so high that they usually can't be seen from the ground.  Second, they can "adjust their density from almost immaterial and invisible to more solid, depending on as yet unknown factors."  As proof, he then shows a series of photographs, some of which are oddly-shaped clouds, and the rest of which even I, with my limited technical expertise, could create from a photograph of the sky given five minutes of playing around with the "Distort" function on PhotoShop.  Here is an example:

He says this is, quote, "Some sort of sky jellyfish."

Swancer then speculates that the Japanese earthquake and tsunami caused a "release of highly-charged particles" that may have disrupted the navigation systems used by the giant atmospheric creatures, causing them to become confused and making them fly at lower altitudes, or possibly making them forget to turn on their cloaking devices.

You might be asking yourself, how do we know these creatures exist?  Well, Swancer says, we don't.  This is "all speculation," he states, but goes on to say that there are lots of other things that biologists have discovered that are so strange that we wouldn't have believed them without evidence, so if this is so strange that we don't believe it, it must be true, as well.  As further proof, he concludes with a final image:

Which, after a small amount of research, I was able to identify as a "Dogora Cloud Beast" from a Pokémon card (see the original card design here).

So, in any case, I think we can conclude from this that we are reasonably safe, for the time being, from having our hometowns attacked by giant flying squid.  Watch out for the enormous sky jellyfish, however.  I hear those things pack a nasty sting.