Worried Farmers Call For Chinese Lantern Ban
Chinese Lanterns have become much more popular these days. People are seeing them in the sky or hearing about other people using them to celebrate and they are becoming more commonplace. I have read many stories where people seem to mistake them for UFO’s or simply do not recognise what the moving light in the night sky is.
This must lead to chaos with frightened calls to the local police reporting an unidentified flying object and I’m sure more than one has telephoned the local astronomy centre for advice too. On a recent visit to Jodrell Bank in Cheshire one of the questions that was asked of the resident astronomer was if he thought that there was life out there in the rest of the Galaxy or indeed the Universe. The expert’s view was that although he could not rule this out there weren’t many planets in our own solar system that could support life but he did tell us one or two funny stories about the public reporting various sightings. He said that in recent times they could mostly be attributed to chinese lanterns and often his first question would be to ask if the light was orange and was it a windy night – if so then this ‘unidentified’ object would be moving pretty swiftly in the dark sky and was in all probability a lantern.