The witness, Ken Roberts, said he noticed the fireball object passing across the sky while driving back home from work. He stopped to record on video what looked to him like an alien UFO crashing from space over southern California and releasing an “escape pod” that could have held alien crew members.
The 30-second video titled, “UFO Crashing Releases Orb Over Southern California. Anyone Else See It?” was posted to YouTube on Jan. 5, 2015.
Watch as a smaller, glowing orb released from the body of the UFO shoots upward. One could, at first sight, dismiss the UFO as a meteorite, a man-made satellite or a rocket crashing from orbit. But as Open Minds’ Jason MacClellan notes, while it is not unusual to see smaller parts breaking away from the main body of a meteorite due to friction as it travels through the Earth’s atmosphere, it is unusual to see the smaller parts moving “straight up into the sky” as though under the influence of a propulsive force.
The “escaped pod” flies out of sight in the video. Roberts explains that he did not follow its trajectory because his camera was focused on the main body of the “crashing” UFO.
Open Minds raises some questions about the video, such as the date of the incident. Although the video was uploaded to YouTube on Jan. 5, Roberts does not confirm that the incident happened on the same day. While we may take his silence on that issue to mean that the incident occurred on Jan. 5, he is remarkably silent about the exact time and location of the incident. He does not say where in southern California he recorded this video.
He writes in the description of the YouTube video:
“I was driving home after work when this UFO or whatever you call it caught my eye. I pulled over in front of somebody’s house to film it. I would have got a better shot but I didn’t want to jump these peoples fence. Anyway I don’t know what the hell to make of it; couldn’t have been a plane because there was no noise. And I never heard a crash after either. The Orb thing flew straight up into the sky and disappeared. Sorry I didn’t film that. I didn’t know what to focus my attention on.”
Needless to say, time and location are vital authenticating information about the purported sighting which one expects that Roberts would provide without prompting.
Relevant in the context of the foregoing observation about missing basic information pertaining to the incident is the observation by Open Minds’ McClellan that groups, such as the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and the American Meteor society, which report on relevant UFO sightings did not report public sightings in southern California around the time Roberts claims he witnessed the spectacular incident.
However, the American Meteor Society reported that people in some parts of northern California reported observing a fireball streaking through the sky on the evening of Saturday Jan. 3. But sightings were not reported in southern California, according to Open Minds.
A witness in northern California observed fragments breaking off from the falling meteorite. The witness said, “Some fragments seemed to emanate from the tail as it fell.”
Another witness said, “I saw a secondary little fireball (very light) at the time of maximum brightness of the first fireball.”
The fact that it is very unlikely that a “UFO” as large and as bright as the one shown in the video would be sighted and filmed by only one person forces us to go along with the suggestion by some viewers that the video could be fake.
A Reddit user comments:
“I think this is faked. The explosion sound is synchronized with the separation of the object, which doesn’t seem possible for the implied distance. The masking on the main object gets sloppy near the end of the video, for example as it emerges from around the pole and passes behind/over the last wire. Also just before the last movement of the camera away from the small object, you can see the mask on the main object slip a bit ahead of time.”
All that is needed to confirm this video is another person coming forward to corroborate the sighting with an independent recording. And it seems odd that after Roberts titles his UFO video with the question “Anyone else see it?” he proceeds to disable the comments for the video.
