Robert Sheaffer, one of the world's leading UFO skeptics, agrees.
"Every time something flies in front of a camera now it's gonna be a UFO -- little bugs, some little bird, anything," Sheaffer said.
When the arch doubter first looked at the Big Easy video, he immediately assumed the mystery object was an insect. But when Sheaffer -- who was featured at this past weekend's all-skeptics CSIcon conference in, coincidentally, New Orleans -- looked more closely at the single "smoking gun" video frame from the cathedral, he admitted it has him a little stumped.
"The first time I watched this thing, I didn't even see that [the rod] was there. Now I'm looking at the part where [the video] is slowing down, slow, slow, zoom, zoom...okay, now I agree -- I see that it pauses right behind the left spire, at least it seems to catch it right behind it, and that building is pretty far away. It really looks like it's going behind."
Another thing adds fuel to the rod fire: Many previous images also show these pesky elongated objects moving in the sky behind things like trees, power poles, buildings, etc. Can all of them be simply explained as tricks or optical illusions resulting in slow camera recording speeds?
"It could be explained as an insect, but what I've found on a lot of footage over the years is that these things do go behind structures, such as this cathedral tower," Escamilla said.
"The camera is not focused up close -- it's focused at infinity. So any insect that would've flown close to the lens would be invisible, it would be an invisible, blurry thing. This thing was in focus and was on the other side of the cathedral tower!"
