The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

We may never know the exact method that the earliest explorers used to find their way, but there is a friendly finger of suspicion that gets pointed regularly at the birds.

Some of the routes used by the pioneers of the Pacific match the migratory routes of the birds exactly.

The route used by the Maori fleet that sailed from Tahiti to New Zealand sometime in the fourteenth century and settled there is the same as that taken by the Long-tailed Cuckoo each September.

I like to think of these earliest navigators. I imagine them gazing up as flocks of birds head uniformly over the horizon in one direction only to repeat the exercised in the opposite direction half a year later. It does not take great leaps of the imagination to deduce that the birds are not doing this great exercise for fun, QED, there must be something in…

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I hesitated before posting this. Working in a slightly unusual field I do have to guard against publishing anything that could be deemed ‘unreliable’.

And, no, I must emphasise that it is not anywhere near April 1st, before continuing…

I would genuinely like the help of a photographer, astronomer or ufologist to try and solve a mystery.

This morning I was taking some photographs of Venus, when I noticed what appeared to be a small white smudge near the planet itself.

In the first picture (viewed on the LCD panel on the back of my camera) I noted it and thought it must have been refraction or some other light/lens phenomenon.

When the next photo showed the same ‘smudge’ to have moved slightly it was a little intriguing. When subsequent photos showed it to be moving steadily I became convinced that it was not an effect but an object of…

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I quickly reached for my camera when I saw these objects in the sky. The picture was taken without a tripod and so they are a little blurred, but it is still just possible to make out the lights. A few seconds later the sky looked completely different and this could lead to suspicions that something unusual was going on, perhaps even stir suspicions of UFOs. The true explanation is very straightforward.

The bright light to the left of the picture is an aircraft turning towards the camera with its landing lights on. The bright light near the top of the picture is Venus. There is a fainter light, barely perceptible amongst the edges of the top part of the cloud and this is Mercury. A few seconds later the aircraft had turned fully and effectively disappeared from view and Mercury had disappeared behind a cloud making the sky appear…

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