Ft. Lauderdale, Florida - 2008

(Editor's Note: We received over 20 images for this sighting. We took a good look at all of them, and decided to post three of the best ones. See photos at bottom of article.)

I've had 2 UFO sightings... The first was on Sep 15th, 2008, at 7:40 PM, while getting ready to shoot the moon rising on the east; Sony DSC-F828 camera mounted on tripod, aimed straight towards the EAST.

I was standing on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, off of A1A route and Las Olas Blvd (UFO Casebook has this already).

My second sighting happened at exactly the same spot, on Nov 5th, 2008, at 12:22 PM, with a handheld Canon EOS Rebel XTi camera with an 18-55mm f/3.5 wide-angle lens.

On both occasions I was working on different school projects for The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, where I was studying at the time; I was not out expecting to get pictures of UFOs.

On Nov 05th, 2008, at 12:22 PM, I was shooting various aspects of the Fort Lauderdale's architectural landscape, including the beach. I was looking straight our NORTH, when I spotted what appeared to be a bright yellow "balloon" flying in a southern route, pretty much towards where I was standing.

I zoomed-in on the object as much as the lens I had on the camera allowed me, that is, to 55mm.

The yellow object on picture #01 is right in the middle of the image; the image has a lot of dark specs due to the narrow f/36 I was shooting with (sensor specks tend to show up with a closed-down diaphragm or f/stop--this is normal with digital cameras).

I followed the yellow object in its south-and-southeast trajectory, taking a total of 19 images of it.

The first shot (#01) is at 12:22:04 and the last (#22) at 12:23:00; this means that my sighting of the yellow object lasted a total of 56 seconds.

#02 is a close-up of #01.

#12, #13 and #18 are enlargements of their preceding images, and #23 is of empty air.

The yellow object seemed to be flying at a steady rate of speed, I'm guessing some 100 mph. The point here being that to my eyes, it looked like it was maintaining an even velocity, all the way to the point when it literally vanished in the air, without any changes in apparent speed, color, shape or flight pattern.

The last picture I took of the object (#22) has a camera time stamp of 12:23:00. The last image I took, after the object had already disappeared, is time-stamped at 12:23:03 (#23); this is a picture of empty air of course.

Something that puzzles me profoundly, upon close examination of the pictures, is how, in some of the photographs, the object projects a shadow of itself in the air.

Not being a physicist, I don't even dare theorize how any object can accomplish this feat--that of projecting a dark, well-defined shadow of itself in the air--not on the ground or upon another solid object, but in the thin, bright, noon Atlantic air off of Fort Lauderdale's beach.

Another thought worth mentioning perhaps, is that Fort Lauderdale is located at the western tip of the Bermuda Triangle, and very close to the U.S. Navy's AUTEC "submarine Area 51" facility.

Again BJ, feel free to publish and distribute!

Juan Manuel Ramírez

Bogotá Colombia