the open file

So I refuse to say that the UFO sighting, known as The Kilcullen Incident, has been conclusively explained.
There is an exceptionally high probability that it has.
But I still reserve a small part of my intellect for the possibility that it hasn't.
Why?
Perhaps The Kilcullen Incident says something about those of us who have seen UFO's.
Perhaps we fall in love with the possibility of the mystery.
Perhaps for that reason we're a little bit reluctant to give up on it.
It would be like giving up on a dream.
The Lights Of June sighting was the most exciting thing that had happened to many of us in years.
Some local men told me recently how they had piled into their car on the night it happened and raced along country roads towards the lights.
Clearly, for one brief shining moment, the whole thing was the thrill of a lifetime.
But there are other reasons why I have not entirely closed the file on the incident.
At the time I had obtained expert testimony from two of the most highly qualified senior Irish army officers who insisted the lights were simply army parachute flares.
But other army officers demurred from this conclusion because on the video the lights do not appear to move.
Army parachute flares normally drop slowly from a high point in the sky to burn out close to the ground.
The two sceptical experts refute the objections to their testimony by insisting the lights are dropping but the movement is not discernible because they are twenty miles away.
The expert testimony stands.
But not absolutely.
Because when I look at the video, I myself don't believe for a second that those lights are moving.
Also the two sceptical military experts were themselves unwilling to commit to a 100 percent certainty about their conclusions.
One told me: "I'm certain they're army parachute flares alright, but I wouldn't bet my mortgage on it."
Which means he wasn't certain.
There are additional reasons why I still reserve judgement.
A few days after the initial sighting, a framed photograph fell off the piano in my home.
It did so without any apparent help.
At the time I concluded that I was starting to jump at shadows.
But the photograph did fall.
It was a slightly surreal moment and probably means nothing.
And a month after the sighting, I showed the video to Giovanna Rampazzo and a friend of hers at their apartment in Dublin.
They were watching the film fascinatedly enough.
As we watched it, some books on a kitchen shelf fell to the floor.
So you can see a certain proliferation of mysteries.
Yes again it might just be me jumping at shadows.
But the items did fall.
And yes, even if the explanation for the falling items was something extraordinary, ie not a dingy shelf, it still need not necessarily be related to the UFO's.
For instance we might postulate that a sort of hysteric psychic reaction in me or the girls had caused first the photo, and later the books, to clatter to the floor.
The UFO's and the video of the UFO's would then merely be triggers for our own minds' capacities to move objects.
If that was the case then the UFO sighting need not be genuine, but could still have caused genuine unexplained, in this case psychical, phenomena.
Ah, we're all mad, I tells ee.


(The full contemporaneous account and more pictures of The Kilcullen Incident may be viewed in the June and July 2006 archives of this website.)