The Mystery of the Rods

In 1994, while investigating unidentified flying objects in Roswell, New Mexico with his wife,  explorer and filmmaker Jose Escamilla discovered some weird flying objects.  Escamilla thinks rods, as they have come to be known, may be living organisms.  He estimates rods to be from a few inches to over a hundred feet in length.  The first sighting of one may have been in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1896 when the townspeople claim to have seen a thirty-foot long thing in the sky.  Escamilla has recently gotten footage of a cigar-type UFO that is moving from left to right.  Suddenly, two rods zip through.

The naked eye cannot see rods because they move too quickly but they can be captured on film.  They seem to have appendages along their torsos which have a wavelike motion.  The torsos bend as they move.  Because they dodge things to keep from hitting them, rods may be intelligent.

Some think rods are not from Earth.  The thinking goes that since they are so different from anything on Earth, they must be extraterrestrial. 

Not everyone agrees, however.  Most skeptics believe rods are insects caught flying by video cameras, i.e., there is a video effect involved.  The effect is caused by the frame capture rate of the video camera versus the wing beat frequency of the insects.  Thus, you see several wing beat cycles of the insect on each frame of the video.

So, the illusion is created of a rod with bulges along its length.  As it moves forward, the blurred torso of the insect forms the rod.  The wavering of the wings up and down form the bulges.

I believe that rods are as yet unidentified insects or some other life form, even the big ones.  Another theory is that they are tiny spacecraft for tiny aliens.  If they are extraterrestrial, then it is more likely that rods are unmanned probes.  I think they are more likely to be illusions rather than a hoax because it seems to me that this would be a difficult one to pull off.