Bring a camera to your next UFO sighting, please!

I love all things involving spaceships that show up on dirt roads in the middle of nowhere with flashing lights that whisk away at light-speed, only to return hours later with a bewildered farmer who only remembers smoking a cigarette on his front porch swing and then being probed by little green men before waking up on the side of the road.
I also wish I was a card-carrying member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), whose mission is to investigate UFO sightings and collect the data in the MUFON database for use by researchers worldwide.
Short of being abducted by little green men in a spaceship with flashing lights, and not carrying a MUFON card, I can only share the incident that allegedly took place Saturday night near my hometown of Granite Falls. A story filed by the Examiner, an online news and lifestyle publication boasting more than 20 million monthly readers across the U.S. and around the world, tells of a witness who reported seeing an “extremely long craft emitting lights” moving out of a cloud formation near Granite Falls that night as he was outside smoking a cigarette. He said the light flashed onto the ground from pink to blue.
“When this happened I noticed the surrounding area of the ground light up,” the witness stated. “So now I knew that something up there was causing this phenomenon. So I continued to lay there on the hood of my car and watched as it flickered a fourth time.”
He went on to say, with total recall: “I see this long, dark shape come from out of the cloud on the left side. It was extremely long and on its side I could see a string of yellow and white lights that barely gave it a silhouette. But I could tell the bottom was not flat. It was slightly curvy, but not rounded. Almost wavy you could say.”
The witness stated that the object was large. How large, we’ll never know, because the witness (who happens to be a card-carrying MUFON member) had no camera with him. Now, if my mission was to
investigate UFO sightings and collect the data in the MUFON database for use by researchers worldwide, I would have a battery pack, video camera, digital recorder, and three eyewitnesses with me at all time. At least my trusted dog, which barks if a proton circling an atom is slightly out of orbit.
“This was not a small, bright light in the sky. It was nearly the size of the cloud that was covering it and I’m very certain I saw the rear end of it because as it became visible, it was already turning its position towards the north.”
We’ll never know. I want to believe, not just because I love all things involving spaceships that show up in the middle of nowhere with flashing lights, but also because that very night my electricity, and that of a portion of Granite Falls, flickered off and on four times before finally blacking out the town for two hours. Aliens notwithstanding, I placed a call with the police, who told me a power substation failed and that electricity would soon be restored.
Depending on who you believe, the light flashing on the ground from pink to blue that lit up the sky was either from a blown transformer at the substation or a UFO. The witness says the light “just drifted away and eventually disappeared into the night sky.”
According to MUFON, North Carolina merits an ALERT 4 UFO rating, with a higher than average number of UFO sightings than nationally. North Carolina had 23 reports in June 2012, making it the eighth highest reporting state.
Was this the latest UFO sighting? We’ll never know.
I have but one request for any card-carrying MUFON members whose mission it is to investigate UFO sightings and collect the data for use by researchers worldwide: Carry a camera to your next UFO sighting please!