It happened again.
Last week, another viral video swept across the Internet, this one showing what the witness, Jason Swing, believed to be “a spacecraft.”
“This is a spacecraft,” he says plainly during the video’s first moments, while trying desperately (and failing) to align his smartphone with the dark elongated object out in the distance, seen hovering over Lake Norman in Mooresville, North Carolina. “You see that?” he then shouts, before suddenly running off.
The sighting occurred while Swing was at work, sometime around 10:30 a.m., according to the video’s description.
While originally published on May 29, 2018, for whatever reason the curious footage had to wait a few months before the Internet’s collective consciousness decided to catch up (things tend to go viral in August, I’ve noticed). On August 14, the Charlotte Observer also picked up the story.
Its time in the spotlight was short lived, however, as only a day or so later news hit that it was very likely just the good old Goodyear blimp. “We don’t want to get in the way of a good story,” the Goodyear blimp team tweeted, “but that’s definitely us.” The blimp had been in the area on May 29 while “covering the Coke 600,” an annual 600-mile NASCAR race.
Many have speculated that Swing uploaded the video as a joke or a hoax. That said, this isn’t the first time the Goodyear blimp has been mistaken for an alien craft.
In March 2012, a similar incident occurred. An unidentified object — described as a glowing “upside-down bowl” — terrorized residents of Worcestershire, England, to the point where local news stations were contacted by concerned citizens wondering about the mysterious object hovering above them.
It, too, was ultimately identified as a Goodyear blimp, after one of the witnesses grabbed a pair of binoculars for a closer look. “Plastered down the side of the object was Goodyear,” he said, “which I doubt is a trade name on Mars.”
Someday, perhaps, we’ll unravel the mysteries of the Goodyear blimp. But until then, keep your eyes on the skies.
