Living down here, I've seen cotton all along the side of the road too, during the harvest season when it comes off the trucks carrying it away from the field, or where it came off of the harvesters as they moved from one field to the next. I've never seen it aloft, blowing around in the wind, that I recall.
I've already speculated that floating spider silk (from ballooning/migrating spiders) is a better fit than cottonwood fluff in this case.
The word for that stuff is "gossamer", from the term "Goose summer". But gossamer, like cotton or cottonwood tree fluff, is a phenomenon of late summer, yet the Farmington sightings were in March. I understand, the seasons in New Mexico may not line up with the seasons in the east, but that seems to give a problem in identifying the sightings with something blowing in the wind.
This was observation was of something more than 100m away. There's at least one mundane but unusual thing — humanoid puppets— that move in that way and have a reason to be "on top of" something.
I think this and other explanations for the actual sightings of "aliens" works. The only additional thing to explain is how they saw it land and take off.
That seems plausible, as most wouldn't have been paying attention to it then.
Yes, the testimony about seeing an object land or take off is very thin. It's only years later that we hear reports from witnesses who say they saw something flying in the sky above them (see Luke Nel video clip below from Ariel Phenomenon 2022). Other testimony seems consistent with seeing a reflective object change its angle of observation to the children and "disappear" — like a flaring satellite. So a reflective surface like a vehicle might be responsible.
That might not be entirely accurate,
Cynthia Hind, UFO Afrinews No. 11, February 1995, PDF attached to post #201.External Quote:
You're right, but the quotes from Cynthia Hind need to be taken with a large pinch of salt because she frequently embellished testimony to make it fit UFO lore. What I was trying to say is that kids at the time reported only a glinting light in the distance, not above their heads, not moving, not "landing" or "taking off". This changes in later interviews were people start to recall much more detail like seeing an object land. E.g. Emma, as an adult, says she saw a huge flying saucer and several smaller ones landed in an area of the school grounds—something that no one else saw (see the Netflix show Encounters).
We know some of the children reported a light and little else, and most of the children saw nothing unusual at all.
Have you watched the full video of Hind talking with the children posted above? And the clips of Tim Leach talking with some of the children on the Monday? That's all there is in terms of actual footage of the earliest recorded testimony. The rest is filtered through Hind's interpretation, then later other TV interviewers and then Mack, much later. We know Hind spoke with some of the children on the Saturday (before they drew any pictures) by phone, but we don't have any records of how that conversation went and if she suggested certain things or not (I suspect she did).
The problem with this is that the power lines in question are in the valley that the children are looking across and the landscape rises up above them. So "flying along the power lines" need not mean flying in the sky. (see this post in a related Ariel School thread #41).
If the majority saw nothing, or nothing much, and a minority saw unusual and amazing things (but not all the same amazing and unusual things) isn't that what would be expected of a hypothetical case where some children got excited over something perhaps unusual but not extraordinary, given that 1) people observe things through their own points of view, which distorts what is seen, 2) memories are fungible, and 3) they were children, children often lead a pretty rich life in terms of imagination?
