Mystery Revealed: Investigating UFO Sightings of Butterflies Over Mysterious Florida Swamp…
Google Street View is a technological marvel that makes visiting almost any place on the planet (and off-planet) a piece of cake. But it has some problems.
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Case in point: You may have seen a spooky story circulating about a mysterious UFO hovering over a Florida swamp “in broad daylight… just outside the Bermuda Triangle.” Just outside the Bermuda Triangle, folks!
But wait a second. How unidentified is this flying object?
I mean, after all, from time to time, we humans really do witness some really strange things in the sky above our heads that are hard to understand or reconcile.
Other times, people simply get carried away by flaws in Google’s data, conjuring up UFO conspiracies for things that already have perfectly plausible explanations.
Which brings us back to that mysterious UFO hovering over the swampy grass of Ochopee, Florida.
This is what it looks like up close:
(Google Street View)
“An eagle-eyed Google Maps user has reported a mysterious ‘UFO sighting’ in the skies above a Florida swamp,” The Sun reports.
“Even when you zoom in, it’s hard to define exactly what the object is.”
But is it? While the strange shape may be hard to recognise at first, as The Sun later notes towards the end of its article, there is also the distinct possibility that Google’s cameras simply caught a “fast-moving butterfly captured in a single shot”.
Part of the evidence for this is that the UFO is only visible at a frozen moment in time: if you move your virtual location to where the cameras captured the next image, it is no longer visible (which is what you would expect from a butterfly’s erratic flight).
“Of course,” The Sun acknowledges, “a UFO might also avoid overstaying its welcome, so we may never know.”
Oh, I think we know.
I think we know that this image, which was captured in 2011 so isn’t even a current example of a suspected UFO sighting, is in fact a butterfly.
I’m no lepidopterist (that’s a fancy word for moth and butterfly scientists), but given its appearance and habitat, this mysterious UFO could be a swallowtail, perhaps one like this one: the Palamedes swallowtail (Papilio palamedes), which is found in marshy areas, including those in Florida!
For what it’s worth, here’s what they look like up close:
It is really quite striking to look at, but of decidedly terrestrial origin; and while they are unmistakably flying objects, they are almost certainly not extraterrestrial.
