UFO meeting: Isles of Capri residents share stories of sighting a strange light wrote:
ISLES OF CAPRI -- The sun rises in the east, the moon sets in the west, and over Johnson Bay here, some say a much different light hovers low over the water and then vanishes without a trace.

Tuesday, about 75 residents of the Isles and nearby Marco Island gathered at the Isles of Capri community center to discuss sightings of a strange light, the subject of recent news reports on and off the island. As many as 11 sightings have been reported on the Isles since March 27.

The meeting, led by Morgan Beall of the volunteer organization MUFON — the Mutual Unidentified Flying Object Network — sought to encourage more witnesses to come forward with their accounts. It occasionally delved into the other-worldly.

“I do think there’s something going on or I wouldn’t be here,” Beall said at one point.

If the identity of that ‘something’ was left unspoken, it was strongly suggested at times. The hour-and-a-half Q-and-A session diverged from eyewitness accounts of the sightings over Johnson Bay to other sightings in Florida to Beall’s knowledge of potential alien implants, abductions and even cattle mutilations.

A few skeptics made their thoughts known, as well.

“Has your group ever made contact with any of these (objects)?” Carter Smith, 77, an astronomy enthusiast and frequent sky-watcher, asked Beall.

Beall said it hadn’t.

“Well don’t you think they should have by now?” Smith responded.

The recent spate of sightings began with Ann Hall, a columnist for the Marco Island Sun Times who wrote about seeing the object three times in as many days in late March. Local fire chief Emilio Rodriguez thought he captured the object on his station’s weather camera, and Mike Castellano, owner of the Capri Fish House, told Hall that he and some of his employees had seen the same object several times.

Beall documented the reports, and he dug up a pair of older reports from the area dating back to 2008 and 2009. He observed the area several nights for unusual activity, and he tried to identify anything that could be mistaken for a UFO. He traced the arc of the moon, mapped overhead constellations and noted the location of Venus, commonly mistaken for a UFO.

Of the supposed sighting caught on the fire district camera, Beall dismissed it as the setting moon.

But Hall’s account of seeing it on a stormy night suggested people were witnessing something other than a heavenly body, he said.

Isles resident Delicia Craft, 79, gave the crowd her account of seeing a globe-like object by the Gulfview Condominium on April 27. After taking a stroll to watch the moon that night, Craft turned around to see the object hovering by the top floor of the condo, she recalled.

Its round frame was strung with lights, and a metal cube occupied the center, she said. A rope or tether seemed to hang from below, but the condo blocked her view of where it ended.

“It looked like the ball they drop for New Year’s Eve,” Craft said.

UFO witnesses are often reluctant to come forward, Beall said, and he encouraged others to file their reports with the UFO Network.

“These things are not unusual,” he told attendees. “I think people are becoming more — strong word — ‘courageous’ to come out here and talk about it.”

And while his group can discount many reports, it cannot discount them all, he noted. Whether that makes for little green men piloting spaceships across the galaxies, Beall wouldn’t say.

“If it is the real thing, what is the real thing?” he asked.