A rapidly moving, boomerang-shaped unidentified flying object (enlarged above) seen and videotaped above New York's Long Island is still confounding researchers, months after it was spotted.
The only eyewitness in this case reported it to the Mutual UFO Network, which investigates international UFO sightings. The incident (designated as Case 64777) remains listed as an unknown.
On April 17, the witness -- whose name isn't revealed -- was driving home around 10:30 p.m. in Port Jefferson, New York, and noticed an odd light in the sky.
"When I looked to my left, I noticed red and blue lights hovering. I stopped and watched for a little bit to see if it was just someone playing with a toy," the witness wrote in his report to MUFON.
"Then the object went higher into the air and started to move pretty fast. I then took out my phone and started to record for as long as I could till my phone died."
In the following video, the object can be seen accelerating from right to left, slowing down, stopping, blinking and then speeding up again to the left, slowing down again and eventually moving back swiftly in the other direction:
"Nobody else filed a report about this thing in Port Jefferson. It's a highly populated residential area and we have a lot of interesting things in the sky, with both Kennedy and LaGuardia airports just a few minutes away by air, as well as Long Island's MacArthur Airport," said MUFON New York field investigator Joseph Flammer.
The following image from the Port Jefferson video shows, at left, the object in question, and at right, an enlargement of it with some enhanced contrast added:
"One of my main thoughts was that it could have been a drone -- something that somebody sent into the air and the witness might not have suspected that it was a drone," Flammer told The Huffington Post. "There are a couple of large parking fields along Port Jefferson [pictured below] where somebody might have, if so inclined, taken a drone and put it into the air."
Marc Dantonio agrees with the drone possibility. As MUFON's chief photo and video analyst, he's investigated hundreds of cases where drones were the most likely explanation for UFO reports.
"I looked at the video and found there is no reliable way to determine the object's range. This presents us with a problem in determining the nature of the object," Dantonio told HuffPost in an email. "That said, it could be a small object up close, which would put this as a small radio controlled drone or plane. We can't ignore this possibility."
Back in 2011, when drones were just beginning to seep into the public's consciousness, Dantonio -- whose company, FX Models, creates special models for the U.S. Navy, Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C. -- built a sophisticated drone (pictured at the beginning of the slideshow below) used in a National Geographic Channel special, "The Truth Behind: UFOs."
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"The [Port Jefferson] object moves with characteristics illustrating level flight, which is actually typical of a person flying a craft at night," Dantonio said. "There is a curious behavioral trait that people with radio control experience tend to fly in level flight when unsure of the terrain.
"That's not to say it isn't a true unknown -- I am just saying that it is explainable in human terms."
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