A mysterious set of shiny objects sparked a UFO alert over Manhattan yesterday when they were spied drifting over the trendy Chelsea district.
Traffic ground to a halt and thousands of people stopped in the street to point at the sky and the cluster of dots hovering overhead.
Police and the Federal Aviation Authority were deluged with calls and despite mounting an investigation were unable to ascertain what it was.
Within minutes of the first sighting on Wednesday, pictures posted onto microblogging site Twitter and video on YouTube showed a number of tiny silver dots floating around 5,000ft above 23rd St and Eighth Avenue.
Most people were sceptical that the objects were extra terrestrial life, yet remained transfixed nonetheless.
Witness Daniel Calhoun, 52, said: ‘Common sense says it wasn't a UFO. Common sense says it was a plane or a balloon, but this thing stopped everyone in the street for two blocks.
'Any New Yorker will tell you, that alone is extraordinary.’
Joseph Torres, 49, said: ‘It's been hovering there for a while. I'm just kind of baffled. How can it be ordinary? There is something going on.’
Witness Pete Bryant, 32, added: ‘I saw five or six lights shining in the sky. There was no way that thing was a balloon.
‘There was something weird about it. Light just doesn't reflect off balloons like that.’
Some blog posts linked the sighting to a book published by a retired US Air Force officer which said that October 13, the very day the sighting happened, would witness ‘a massive UFO display over the world's principal cities'.
Stanley A. Fulham said in his book ‘Challenges of Change’ that aliens will neither land nor communicate on that date and claimed they are ‘aware from eons of experience with other planets in similar conditions their sudden intervention would cause fear and panic'.
Other witnesses said the sighting was a ‘real Superman moment’, after the comic book hero who lived in New York.
Tim Powell, 28 , said it was ‘the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.
'It looked like a jellyfish made of lights that just hovered in the sky like it wanted to be seen,’ he said.
‘I was half expecting the aliens to beam down and introduce themselves.’
The FAA was unable to find anything abnormal or offer an explanation as to what had happened.
Spokesman Jim Peters said technicians double-checked their radar settings but nothing was amiss. He had also not been informed of any weather balloons due to be in the area.
‘Nothing that we can account for would prompt this kind of response,’ he said.
It has been some time since New York had a UFO scare, although in May a strange object was reported over the skies of New Jersey.
Residents of Somerville and Bridgewater called the police when they saw the long cylindrical object hurtling through the sky - which looked and sounded like an aeroplane.
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