Puzzling sky objects have been hot in the news lately. They’ve been the focus (sorry) of recent Congressional hearings where some representatives have demanded that government agencies “come clean” and “admit” that space aliens are visiting earth, and that crashed flying saucers are moldering in storage hangars. It being a totally logical proposition that intrepid extraterrestrial explorers navigate the inestimable vastness and perils of abyssal interstellar space, only to near-sightedly broadside themselves into desert mesas when they finally fetch up in New Mexico.

Officially, they’re calling this stuff “unidentified aerial phenomena.” But we all know it’s warmed-over UFOs; I won’t indulge this embarrassingly lame attempt at re-branding.

The thing about UFOs is that people with binoculars and telescopes never see them. A sharp, magnified sky view inevitably reveals something pedestrian. I’m in my sixties; I’ve been an ardent sky watcher since age eight; and I’ve navigated a multi-engine Air Force KC-10 tanker at night at 40,000 feet and 580 mph, taking star shots for hours above the inky-dark Indian Ocean with a bubble sextant and a chronometer. (No pansy-ass GPS for me.) I’ve seen plenty of unusual things in the sky, including the weird and rare Green Flash (look it up). I have yet to see anything unexplainable.

That said, sometimes I’ll evaluate other people’s weird sightings. Want to hear one of my favorites?

In the 1990s, while I was researching hyper-bright meteors with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, I was handed a UFO report from near Alamosa in the San Luis Valley.

My witness and a friend of his had been roofing a house when they saw a dazzling, concentrated point of light in the southern sky. It was a degree or two above the horizon on a cloudless sunny afternoon. It hung roughly motionless in the sky for a couple of hours before instantaneously (“mysteriously,” in subsequent media reports) vanishing.

People all over southern Colorado saw it. A TV station gave it airtime, reporting an FAA statement that “area radars showed nothing out of the ordinary.”

My contact snail-mailed me a camcorder videotape that he’d shot. The recording was a few minutes long, taken through an auto-focusing motorized telephoto lens.

In the tape, the UFO pulsated, going from a big, ill-defined blob to a nearpoint, and then back to a large silvery blob every few seconds. It oscillated like that throughout the recording with a faint, synchronized, varying-pitch background audio whine. The diagram shows my sketched still frames of one of the UFO’s pulsation cycles.

My correspondent didn’t say it exactly, but there was a triumphal flavor in his communication that ran like, “explain THIS ONE, Dr. Science Smarty Pants.”

Challenge accepted.

On receiving the videotape, I figured out the San Luis Valley UFO in a few minutes.

That’s all the information I had, and that you need, to identify this UFO. Give it a try.

Hints: It was a real thing in the sky, not a fake; heed every clue I’ve provided; and it wasn’t a spaceship from Zeta Ophiuchi. Tune in to this column in October for the answer.

Backyard Astronomy Talk Series: This correspondent’s next talk, “Mercury is Retrograde: Should I Hide Under My Bed?” will be at the Nederland Library at 7 p.m. on October 4. Details and free registration at https://nederland.colibraries.org/ backyard-astronomy/.

In September skies: The sun begins the month in Leo, entering Virgo on September 16. On the fall equinox (11:22 p.m. in Nederland on September 22), days equal nights at 12 hours each.

The moon’s dates are: Last Quarter September 8; New September 14; First Quarter September 21; Full (Harvest or Corn Moon) September 29.

September Meteors: The epsilon-Perseid shower (parent of an unknown retrograde comet with ~ 1,000 year period) peaks on September 9.

Best Sky Viewing Nights (Minimal Moon): September 8 - 21.

Sunset (Mid-Month): Deneb is nearly overhead in the east; Vega is overhead; and Altair is in the south-southeast. Hercules with its striking M-13 globular cluster is overhead. Sagittarius, with our galactic center, is low in the south.

Midnight (Mid-Month): Auriga (the Charioteer) with brilliant-white Capella is in the northeast. Perseus is high in the east. Pegasus is nearly overhead while Altair sets in the west.

Sunrise (Mid-Month): Orion is due south. Procyon (Star Before the Dog) is high in the southeast. Cetus (the Whale) is low in the southwest.

Mercury is at maximum elongation (greatest angle from the sun) low in the eastern pre-dawn sky of September 22 and 23.

Venus is the Morning Star in the east, brightest and highest at dawn September 18 - 20.

Mars is lost in the sun.

Jupiter, in the Ram, rises at 9:30 p.m., is high in the south at 4 a.m. and in the southwest at sunrise.

Saturn, in the Southern Fish, is low in the east at sunset, high in the south at midnight, and low in the west at sunrise.

Notable Space Missions: Speaking of UFOs, the OSIRIS-REx sample-return capsule from Asteroid Bennu blazes through a white-hot atmospheric entry and parachutes into the Utah desert on September 24, like in The Andromeda Strain. The NASA mission, launched in 2018, collected dirt samples from the asteroid in 2020. Those extraterrestrial bits will tell us about the solar system’s early formation, as long as no space viruses have hitched a ride.

Frank Sanders, a spectrum scientist at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Boulder, takes astronomy-related inquiries at backyardastronomy1@gmail.com.