Atmospheric beast
Atmospheric beasts are alleged cryptids reported from the world's skies and lower atmosphere, known from explicit sightings, and as a biological explanation for UFO phenomena.
Significant sightings
1959
A significant sighting of an apparently biological UFO occurred in on 2 November 1959. Around midday, in the Escola Industrial e Comercial de Évora, the dean, Professor Joaquim Guedes do Amaral, was called to the front yard to witness a flying object of unknown origin. It was a particularly sunny and cloudless day, allowing for good visibility. He and the others witnessed a flying round object going slowly from east to west. The dean then went to his office to use a telescope to observe the object better. He saw a round light blue elliptic body, that increased and decreased in size, and accelerated but also stopped mid air. A few minutes later, a second bigger object appears as well approaching the first one - it seemed to move in an undulatory way, similar to medusozoa (sea jellies). Both objects gained altitude and disappeared quickly into the sky. Immediately afterwards, "angel hair," as it is commonly called, began falling from the sky.[1]
This angel hair (perhaps a parallel to the "star jelly" phenomenon also commonly associated with UFOs) was an agglomerate of filaments, almost spider-silk like with a white coloration, that seemed to dissipate quickly, specially in contact with human body heat. A couple hours prior, these same filaments were observed in the Sintra air base,[2] 125 km (77 miles) west-northwest of Evora, by pilot Conceição e Silva, future Chief of State of the Portuguese Air Force. The angel hair was said to be sticky, and it "rained" on Évora for a few hours, much longer than the few minutes it did in Sintra, according to witnesses. This allowed the dean, Professor Amaral, to collect a sample for a closer look. During his observation, he detected among the filaments a tiny organism, 4 mm in length, formed by a central nucleus and ten tentacles, covered by a gelatinous, transparent, slightly yellowish substance.[1]
Professor Amaral was also friends with Conceição e Silva's father, a professor at the Navy school and associate member of the French Astronomical Society. Thus Amaral contacted him still unsure of what to make of this event and in hopes of finding answers. They put the slide containing the sample under microscope and spectroscope finding nothing that could be conclusively tied to known organisms except for a sodium line, which is a common element. It seemed to react to being compressed in the microscope slide, as it stretched when under physical pressure, perhaps suggesting an animal rather than vegetable trait. Amaral, not wanting to give up, contacted other professors to try and reach a conclusion. One of the biologists asked to take a crack at the case said that the closest being in resemblance to the organism might be Coelenterata, but still it could not be classified by her then-current biological knowledge. The cellular biologist, Carlos Azevedo, which had been originally asked by Amaral about the organism, compared the organism to starfish, describing it as a decaradial body, seemingly with no cellular organisation and not unicellular, in a later documentary episode focused on this case, produced by portuguese state TV RTP2 in cooperation with the CTEC at the Fernando Pessoa University.[1]
Due to the polemics of the phenomenon, and the contemporary political and social climate of Portugal, then under the New State regime, this case was not talked about much and brought some negative light to Gomes do Amaral's carreer. Thus he decided to give up his private pursuit and gave the sample to the Faculty of Science at the University of Lisbon, for further studies and analysis. Not much is known about what happened afterwards as any documentation, alongside the sample, was destroyed in a huge fire in the University in 1978.[1]
This sighting was unusual not just among the atmospheric beast study but in cryptozoology at large due the huge amount of witnesses, including several respected members of society, a military report confirming the events, photographic and journalistic evidence and most importantly physical evidence which is alleged confirm the existence of an unknown organism. There were also two other events in Portugal, in Alfene and Montargil in the 1970s and 1990s which might be classified as biological UFOs due to the seemingly gelatinous texture of the observed phenomenon, suggesting perhaps a geographical hotspot for these creatures.[1]
Notes and references
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