Salvation Revelation

The tiny beach town of Capitola, Calif., is buzzing about a mysterious object that appears to have been photographed on May 16 of last year. Someone using the name Raji posted images on the Web site Craigslist, answered a few questions from UFO hunters around the world, and then just disappeared into cyberspace.

Someone using the name Raji claims to have taken this photo on May 16 in Capitola, Calif. “I have no clue what this thing is so I’m putting it out there to see if anyone else saw it,” he wrote when he posted it online. Soonafter Raji vanished and closed his e-mail account.

As news spread about the unidentified object, others came forward on the Web to say they had also seen it. Videos and other images of what soon became known as the “California Drone” were published on the Internet.

Then came a call in January to private detective, T.K. Davis, a former Santa Clara County sheriff deputy. An unidentified woman from Open Minds Forum, a group specializing in “UFOology,” was willing to pay him $100 an hour to investigate the sighting.

Davis doesn’t believe in UFOs, but he took the woman seriously and has been on the case with a partner, Frankie Dixon, ever since. What does Davis think now? For one, he believes the object in the photo is too intricate to be the work of a Photoshop scam artist. He’s searched high and low to determine what it may be, and talked with many doubters, but has yet to find a logical answer.

Davis has even talked to the local power company to try to determine where the telephone pole in the photograph is located. Before vanishing, the person who claimed to take the photograph e-mailed the woman from the Open Minds Forum saying the image was shot outside his fiancee’s parents home. If Davis can find the telephone pole, he believes, he can find the person who took the photo.

An article published in the Los Angeles Times about the photographs last week has sparked more interest in the UFO sighting, but Davis says he still doesn’t have any solid evidence on whether or not the photographs are real. “The more research we’ve done, I’m leading towards believing,” he told the San Jose Mercury News. “I’m not a skeptic anymore.”

Many bloggers on UFO sites have called the images a hoax, claiming they have been digitally altered. Others have contacted Davis saying they had seen a UFO in Capitola several years ago. One person, a man named Isaac that Davis found through the Mutual UFO Network, claims the strange object bears a similarity to crafts that were built as part of a U.S. government project he worked on in Palo Alto in the 1980s.

Davis has investigated this too, but can’t confirm the project ever existed. Speculation continues to run rampant, but until Davis speaks with Raji, the person who took the photos, he says it will remain a mystery.

More than 50 residents of Stephenville, Texas, reported seeing a large, silent, fast-moving object hovering over their rural town in early January. Initially, the military said it didn’t have any planes in the area, but later officials claimed that F-16 fighters were training around that time.

Mexican Air Force pilots filmed strange brightly lit objects that moved quickly in the skies on March 5, 2004. Some scientists said the phenomenon could have been caused by gases in the atmosphere.

An unidentified flying object was photographed by a government employee over the Holloman Air Development Center in New Mexico in 1964. Conspiracy theorists have claimed the photo is proof that the U.S. government has been in contact with aliens.

America’s most infamous UFO case centers in Roswell, N.M. Some people claimed an alien spacecraft crashed there in 1947; the military said it was a weather balloon.

The Air Force issued the “The Roswell Report” in 1997. Countering claims that aliens were recovered at the site, the report said military officials picked up 200-pound dummies, pictured above, that were used in an experiment.

While descending an Austrian mountain in 1954, photographer Erich Kaiser captured an image of what he called mysterious silvery-white flying objects.

President Jimmy Carter, shown here in 1980, reported that he saw a UFO above Leary, Ga., in 1969. He filed a report about the sighting to the International UFO Bureau in 1973.

Astronaut Gordon Cooper, who piloted several space missions in the 1960s, once said he saw a “typical saucer shape, double-cylindrical shape, metallic” UFO.

An investigator in 1989 measures markings that some said were left behind by a UFO in Normandy, France. France began releasing its “X-Files” on UFO sightings last March.

Meteors, like these darting through the sky in a time-elapsed photo in 2001, are sometimes misidentified as UFOs.

UFO Photos Draw National Attention