<a href="http://www.siriusufo.org/tr/?fx=sayfa_ac&amp;url=html/english/kumburgaz_2008.asp" target="_blank"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-994" style="border: 0; vertical-align: top; margin: 8px;" title="turkufo1" src="http://strangeattractor.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/turkufo1.jpg" alt="" width="427" height="347" /></a>

The past few year has seen a rash of <a href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ31Ak02.html" target="_blank">spectacular UFO sightings over Turkey</a>, and now, highlights from the video footage shot by witnesses have appeared on Turkey's <a href="http://www.siriusufo.org/tr/?fx=sayfa_ac&amp;url=html/english/kumburgaz_2008.asp" target="_blank">SIRIUS UFO</a> web site. Ah, just in time to distract the world's UFO researchers from the US presidential elections. [Do they vote Democrat or Republican? – I hope to find out at <a href="http://www.ufoconference.com/" target="_blank">this conference</a> in Las Vegas in November].

The still above is from night-time video shot this year by Yalcin Yalman in Istanbul. It's early days yet, but the footage is quite striking, though it's tempting to file it away with the California drones and others as too good to be true. It's one of the strange paradoxes of the UFO field that the clearer an image is, the less convincing it appears to be.

My initial thoughts follow after the break:

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The daylight footage over the ocean is classic UFO material, with the added functionality of birds and fishermen in the foreground to provide scale and perspective. The string of orange lights doesn't necessarily imply a structured object, but it's certainly curious and in keeping with many other unexplained sightings. Initially I thought about oil rigs, but I would hope that SIRIUS UFO looked into that possibility before making the video public.

I do have a couple of problems with the 'hardcore' night time footage, though:

* we don't really get any spatial or geographic reference points to anchor us in reality. This isn't a creative criticism, but a practical one - a mysterious object against a blank, black background could be hanging anywhere - like in a cupboard. However if the footage is of a genuine high-flying object shot in the dead of night then there is only a black background. Zooming out to give us some ground features would have been helpful, if less dramatic.

* it's shot by the same night security guard, Yalcin Yalman, who caught UFOs on tape from the same location in a year ago. To counter this, after the first sighting he may of course have kept his eyes peeled and a video camera handy. You've got to do *something* to occupy yourself on those long nights).

Whatever it is, the object has incredible presence, with the mechanorganic feel of something from HR Giger's workshop, or the revived <em>Battlestar Galactica</em>. The lighting effect about half way through is spectacular and tallies with 'genuine' UFO reports from as far back as the 1950s. So if it is a scale model, full marks to whoever built it. And if it's not... brrrr... we are property.

Given that Turkey is more or less slap bang between the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, we might also consider whether these are military reconnaissance platforms of some kind. If so, they're not doing a great job of maintaining a stealthy presence in the region. "Roger, we left the running lights on again... D'oh!"

The excerpt is quite long at 20 minutes, but well worth persevering with. Regular moments of levity are provided by the english subtitles, which feel like they might have been written by Sacha Baron Cohen at times, though don't let that distract you from the UFOs!

There's sure to be a lot of fallout from the footage, so watch this space for updates...

View the <a href="http://www.siriusufo.org/tr/?fx=sayfa_ac&amp;url=html/english/kumburgaz_2008.asp" target="_blank">footage</a> and let us know your thoughts via the comments feature.