Kinnegad ‘UFO’ mystery solved

The Kinnegad ‘UFO’ mystery has been solved – and it turns out there were no aliens involved!

Two weeks ago (November 2 edition), we reported that a website that keeps track of UFO sightings worldwide had an account of something unusual having been spotted in the sky over Kinnegad on September 2.

The site described the sighting as having been of “a horseshoe-shaped object, which kept flipping over in the sky”, moving from left to right at about the same speed as an airplane.

However, on reading the report in our newspaper, local man Michael Peters was fairly sure the object was the paramotor owned by another local, called Cathal Fowler. A paramotor is a type of paraglider fitted with a motor engine.

“Were you up that day?” Michael asked Cathal by text, sending him a picture of the Westmeath Examiner article.

Cathal responded with three laughing emojis – and a screengrab showing the flightpath he had taken on the date in question, which started in Kinnegad, took him west of Mullingar and then back again, averaging 55kmh, and reaching a top speed of 80kmh.

Michael revealed that once he read the ‘UFO’ was horseshoe-shaped, he immediately suspected it was Cathal in his paramotor.

The report to the UFO website by the two observers who spotted what they believed to be a mystery craft stated that the sighting lasted between 3 and 4 minutes and the viewers estimated the size of the object as being that of a small plane. They said in their report that they watched the object as it crossed the sky until it went out of view.

Their fuller description of their experience read: “It was early evening and the sky was still very bright. The object was black and shaped like a horseshoe with the open ends facing away from its direction of travel, and kept flipping over which made it look flat at times. This flipping motion was happening every few seconds and did not seem natural.”