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SkyFish (Rods)
They may be all around us... in the sky, in the water, even in our homes. They have been captured only on film and videotape. No one knows what they are, where they come from, whether or not they are alive, and they have never been touched or seen at rest.
They are called "rods," "skyfish" and sometimes "solar entities." Although the video evidence is compelling that they are quite real and probably living creatures, they are completely unknown to science - a fascinating and baffling mystery.
Skyfish were first documented by filmmaker José Escamilla, who discovered them by accident. In 1994, Escamilla had videotaped a "conventional" UFO near Midway, New Mexico. Fourteen days later, while seeking to photograph the UFO again, he instead captured a flying object that was not a vehicle of any kind. At first he thought it was just an insect or bird. When he examined the film frame by frame, however, it became clear that what he had captured on film was something unknown. Later, more distinct images were captured while Escamilla was filming cliff jumpers at a deep cave in Mexico. When he developed the film, small flying things could be seen zipping around the divers at a high rate of speed - so fast that they weren't seen with the naked eye.
The enhanced frames of film revealed that the flying thing appeared to be rod-shaped with two undulating wings or appendages along the length of the body and which gave it the appearance of swimming through the air. Escamilla dubbed them "rods" and has since filmed and videotaped them dozens of times. And after introducing them to the public through his website, roswellrods.com, he has received further reports and video and photographic evidence from other parts of the US and around the world. The strange flying enigmas have also turned up in documentary footage, TV news shots and even feature films.
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Explanations
Rods are not taken seriously even by most cryptozoologists. All evidence points to the conclusion that they are mere tricks of light which result from how images (primarily video images) are recorded and played back. In particular, the fast passage before the camera of an insect flapping its wings has been shown directly to produce rod-like effects, due to motion blur, if the camera is shooting with relatively long exposure times. (In low-light conditions or even when pointed at blue sky, the automatic exposure programming of a video camera is likely to select the longest possible exposure time, which is 1/60th second per video field for NTSC format or 1/50th second for PAL format.) This criticism points to such video being physically unable to capture a clean image of something which moves so fast relative to the camera. In particular, the "membrane" in a video frame of a rod is effectively a time-lapse of the wings of the flying animal in different positions over several wingbeats that occurred during the field exposure time, while the central "rod" is a time-lapse image of the body, showing the full distance traveled during the field exposure time. The effect is especially pronounced with large, long-bodied insects which have broad wings and fairly slow wingbeats, such as mantises, grasshoppers, and katydids, or completely opaque wings such as moths. On video equipment which resolves the two interlaced fields of a single video frame (which are captured successively and then displayed as alternating horizontal lines), the "rod" effect can be seen to alternate from one field to the other, producing the distinctive gaps between successive images. Similar results can be produced using standard film, if there is a long exposure and/or a stroboscopic lighting effect which lasts more than a single wingbeat. This is the technical evidence, demonstrating that one can produce "rod" effects at will if one uses the right equipment, lighting, and subject.
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