UFO. United States

One night in New Mexico, Ethan Siegel encountered something that had been bothering him for almost two decades.

Many UFO sightings can easily be attributed to stars, planes, flares, drones and other mundane things, but when the person reporting the sighting is a pilot, policeman, soldier or scientist, we tend to pay more attention to what they saw and what they thought it was.

In a recent article for Big Think, Ethan Siegel, a doctor of astrophysics, described a UFO sighting that he has been trying to make sense of for many years, but which continues to be a complete mystery.

It happened in December 2006, when he and a friend were returning from a trip to Bandelier National Park in New Mexico.

They were driving through a remote desert at dusk when Siegel noticed a "glowing blue light in the shape of an ellipse" that was at first stationary in the sky and then began to move slowly.

"As it approached, it became brighter, but it looked like nothing but a solid blue disk, and seemed to be picking up speed at an alarming rate," he wrote. "Then it raced to the right, faster and farther away from us, and after about two or three seconds of movement at maximum speed "the light just went out."

What is interesting about this observation is how Siegel engaged in deconstructing what he saw, trying to exclude various traditional explanations based on his own experience.

In the end, he came to the conclusion that he could not find a definitive answer - instead, he put forward a number of unlikely, in his opinion, options, including the option of alien origin.