| The unidentified light-emitting flying object over Mt Jiri on Aug. 8. Courtesy of Lee Won-gyu |
By Park Si-soo
Did a UFO fly over Mt Jiri in South Korea last week?
Photos of an unidentified light-emitting flying object that Lee Won-gyu captured on Aug. 8 (from 12:14 a.m. to 12:24 a.m.) at Mt Jiri have raised this question.
Lee, a poet and amateur astronomy photographer, saw the object while looking at the Milky Way through a 14-millimeter telescope-mounted camera.
The camera was on a tripod and the object is captured in five photos.
“I initially thought it was a super-bright cloud,” Lee told a newspaper. “But I changed the thought and presumed it could be a UFO after seeing the light's shape and location change again and again.
“I've seen and captured a slew of stars and shooting stars in the night sky for over six years. But it was something I've never seen ever before.”
| The object was emitting light in all directions. But its right side was far brighter. Courtesy of Lee Won-gyu |
| Time-lapse photos of the object. Courtesy of Lee Won-gyu |
According to Lee, the object was emitting light in all directions. But its right side was far brighter. The scope of light was too thick to consider it the natural ring around a shining celestial body. It moved “not fast” while the lighting point got smaller and disappeared.
By coincidence, this mysterious phenomenon was observed by another man nearby. The observer, surnamed Kim, shared several photos of the object on his Facebook account, with a short description of his observation.
| Captured from Kim's Facebook account |
“I was talking with two people from an astronomical observatory in Cheongju,” Kim wrote. “A bright object emerged from the northwest side of the sky with a waving white tale curved nearly 90 degrees. I looked at it through a telescope, and it moved slowly through stars for 10 minutes. Three of us are not ignorant of astronomy. But we all don't know what happened.”
The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute said that judging from the photos and descriptions the observed phenomenon was “not something natural.”