The Bernalillo "UFO" - Identified

Proving, once again, what a wonderful tool that the Internet can be, it seems that we have a solution for the pictures that Rob Swiatek mentioned on the radio show and that I posted to my blog. Remember, I mentioned, several times, the blog’s address and that the pictures were there for all to see.

Also remember that both Rob and I believed that the solution was something manmade and something on the ground. The pictures and later the video showed, basically, the same array of lights. They were taken months apart which argued for a mundane solution, not one that involved alien visitation.

Less than 48 hours after posting the pictures, we have the answer. Someone named, or rather identifying him or herself as Rossome, posted the following:

I am quite certain that the photographs are of the Ivanpah Solar field near the Nevada/California border north of I-15. The design is not based on solar collectors, but rather, thousands of mirrors that aim the sunlight toward a tower (the center of each of the three arrays of mirrors). The focused sunlight then heats the water system to turn to turbines and make electricity. This facility is in fact visible from the ground as well (seen a few times) and look pretty interesting. I have photos from the ground if anyone is interested.

Well, I would have been interested, but then I learned of pictures of the Ivanpah Solar Field from the Internet and recovered several pictures from various sites. There seems to be little doubt that Rossome was correct with the information. One of the pictures shows an aerial view of the array, minus the bright lights, in about the same “formation.”

I passed the information along to Rob because I don’t know how often he visits the blog, but he responded in a couple of hours. He wrote:

Wow!  That cinches it, beyond the shadow of a doubt.  I compared online pictures of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility with the lights and terrain in the CMS photos and it’s a match.  It can’t be anything but the Ivanpah Facility.  It also appears the towers of the Facility generate a certain amount of light—at least at times during their operation—so this would account for the brightness across a long slant range during the day.  As Bruce Maccabee depicts in his recent book on the Arnold sighting, a square of highly reflective material (the Ivanpah towers have a square cross-section) appears as a circle when seen from a distance.

We can now write this off as a true IFO – Identified Flying Object – which, of course, is merely the vernacular for UFO sightings that have been identified. I suppose we could call it an Identified Grounded Object, but whatever the term, this is no longer part of the UFO phenomenon.