Could also be the ISS.

Nope, Jupiter is under the horizon now and here. I've seen it last week in conjunction with Venus. It was a nice look, but nothing to alert the world. Neither it could be Mars, Uranus, Saturn, Neptune or Pluto.
I'll provide some photos tomorrow. The ones I have are photographed against an orange street lights, which effectively hides all normal stars and planets on the camera, just that unknown star-like object still shines brightly. The difference in luminosity must be huge.

Well, it the fog disappeared and the sky is clear, but I don't see anything up there. Either it's already under the horizon, or it was UFO, which doesn't usually stay in one place for long. Gotta wait for more reports from the world.

/facepalm.

Yeah. It could be either object within your false dichotomy.

Or maybe - just maybe - it was the International Space Station. Or some other satellite.

...?

Because I mentioned a real object rather than a fictitious one as my guess?

I was mainly interested so I could look up what bright astronomical objects might be visible from your location.

I have visited Prague a couple of times as a tourist, most recently in 2003. Quite interesting.

So you aren't aware presumably that when the ISS can occasionally be at such an angle that the reflection of the sun off its solar panels can make it one of the brightest objects in the sky.

How many hours have passed, and still no mention of a mystery star on television, radio, or internet? Must be a conspiracy. zero evidence + wild speculations + no media attention to zero evidence and wild speculations = cover up!

The OP said that Lum had photos, and that it was too foggy to see anything. Which is it? Maybe his astrologer father can calculate the gravitational influence of the Ob/Gyn that delivered him, factor in the pull of the giant singularity at the center of our galaxy, retroactively add Sedna and Eris to the equation, and then explain this visibility/non-visibility phenomena to us. But I have to suspect that he'll need to examine some sheep intestines, bob a plum, and maybe drop a hit of acid before we get any real answers.

Edited to remove error.

All right, so here is the promised photograph. I picked the worst one to show, how the object is visible despite of the unhospitable conditions (street lamps). The object was a single spot, the main photo is of course moved during a long camera exposition. On the side there are 100% scale details from other photos which are better.
http://img399.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lightonskyolomoucgw5.jpg
I could provide several megabytes of other photos, but this seems to be nothing big after all. I'm sure that more of such a stuff will appear in the world, maybe even something really big.

Well, I find it entertaining that the skeptics are so desperate to find an easy rationale to explain something, instead of simply saying that they don't know. The occurence of such an objects on the sky is increasing rapidly, and some cases, if they are authentic, are absolutely impossible to explain by anything we know. What a next banal explanation will be? A silent military helicopter with an installed discotheque stroboscope scared the city at night? Or a big swarm of fireflies got blown upsides by wind streams and carried across the sky? Maybe a big hungry owl attacked a person carrying a flashlight, and the flashlight got hung on it's talons and carried around by the owl's flight?

 

Anyway, if such an increasing occurence cannot go on forever unnoticed. I had read a prognosis somewhere that one particularly big should appear and be visible even in a daylight. It's not impossible, when such a thing already happened 20 years ago. Don't ask me how, I just guess. Shortly after the woman from Olomouc called and send the photos.
And the Christmas is soon to come, I know it sounds a bit corny to see a bright star on Christmas, but I'm sure all the world would love it, maybe except of astronomers.

Speaking of which, Bob, did you see the smilie face last week, we had a flawless view of it here. Probably the coolest thing I've seen ever.

 

My understanding is that Christianity, and almost all goodforce-versus-evilforce religions, stole the "the superhero savior cometh and doth intend to smite all evil forever" theme from Zoroaster.

 

 

I thought it's automatical, that it's a common sense to check if it isn't a space station. I thought that the people aren't that much stupid and they know about Venus, Jupiter or space stations, and when they see something that doesn't fit in there, they grab a camera and alert the friends. For example, something changing colors or changing direction is immediately suspicious, and an extreme speed or no speed at all are another suspicious factors. Without the common sense, I'd be startled whenever I look on the sky. You're probably used to a TV shows full of people who discovered the ISS space station for the first time. I didn't know I have to put out one utterly common (though beautiful) space object after another, so we can be sure that something is going on. The really unusual things should be obvious.

Furthermore, I had read somewhere (multiple sites actually, it's a common statement), that 95% of UFO reports can be explained by mundane causes. Sometimes there's an add that the remaining 5% are not witnessed well enough to decide. Well, this is not what the reports says. They contains a detailed information on very unusual activity, which can not be mistaken with anything. So it is a question of their authenticity.  Considering, that dozens, maybe hundreds of these events happens every month all across the world, without any measurable benefit for anyone specific, there is currently no force on Earth which could have finances, technology and motivation to replicate such a parade. It also means that there is no motivation to fake them, most of the sightings is given out by common people, who have more problems with it than a benefit. The only imaginable motivation on our planet is a short-termed commercial interest, but this is not how UFO behaves.
Surely, as around every unusual phenomenon there are crazy claims, like the abduction, but I know a lot of UFO witnesses, having heard of not even one alien abductee. I think it's an urban legend.
The monthly collection of UFO sightings in my favorite magazine are always significant and reported by various sources or institutions. (websites, names, time, place, etc) I can't verify every such a report, but I obviously, Stephenville Empire Tribune, Alitalia Airlines, The Sun (UK magazine) and other sources or officials are willing to put their name behind these messages.
An interesting and recent event was this October in Argentina: http://www.ufocasebook.com/2008c/chicoanalanding.html
 

You're pushing the limits, man. All right, let's make a bet. I upload the original files and you check the EXIF data if they're true. If yes, you will remove my 'theist' badge. If not, I won't visit this forum for a month.
Do you agree?
If not, pull back and apologize.

 

 

Ok Lum, you claim to have taken this photo yourself. So it would be easy for you to take another photo of the same spot in the sky from the same angle or vantage point during the day. This would give us a better idea of the position it occupied in the sky as we compare it to visible objects.

And by the way, if you want to claim that your photographs demonstrate motion of the object, you might want to explain the motion of the street lights as well. It is obvious that the ' motion ' conveyed by the photo was due to a shaking hand or otherwise unsteady platform while snapping the shot. The object shows the same " L " shaped distortion that the street lights do in the photo.  That it lines up rather nicely with the row of street lights to the right makes me suspicious as well, but a simple daylight photo of the area could easily rule this out.

No, we have had cloud over most of the time it was in the best smiley face arrangement. It may have been visible at some point in a break in the cloud, but I wasn't outside at the right time.

I did see a rather stretched-out version of it later.

OK, but in your earlier post you only mentioned that your Dad had a map of astronomical objects, you didn't say whether either of you had actually checked for satellites which might have been in the right position to explain it.

And we know from many accounts that most "common people" do not "automatically" do checks to eliminate satellites or all other possible explanations before reporting, which is ok because they may not be aware of the other possibilities or have ready access to the information.

We also know that some people do fake these things, mostly for the fun of it, and it wouldn't take more than a computer and/or a camera and a graphics program to fake any of the UFO photos, we know people have actually done this in some cases. No need to propose a global conspiracy. Like the crop circle stuff, 'motivation' is not a problem.

And these days there are a lot more helicopters flying around at night, so if they are high, and the conditions are such, or they are high enough, you may not hear them. I know I have seen them here and in USA, they would readily match many of the reports of lights either stationary, or moving in ways that planets or satellites wouldn't, and might even turn their lights of at times.

Not trying to explain everything away by this, just pointing out something that would fit very well many 'lights in the sky' reports, as well as any actual increase in such reports.

Interesting - yes. The marks themselves do not seem to be anything particularly new or outside the range of other flattened grain events, as far I can tell from the photo.

Pity they don't show any photos clearly matching the reports of 'meter deep' marks.

I know a bit of a little of a lot but I am not an expert in one thing. I know that my car battery creates electricity in combination with my altinator, but I don't presume that an elf made my car because I cant build one from scratch.

I just happend to learn that "swa" thing in college, and btw, thank you for correcting that.

That doesn't mean I trace every bit of history of every culture and every language in history. It just makes sense that religion, like words can  change, just like every year scientists need to create a new flu vacine because the virus has changed.

Luminon, you just admitted that you didn't even take the damn photograph. So if it was someone smeared the light by jarring the camera as they took the picture, you would never have known it.

Would you take a deep breath, step back for a minute and just look at the picture? That is plainly not a fast-moving object. It's an optical effect.

 

If you can't admit to yourself that your dad is a fraud and these 'friends' of yours are likewise, well, that's your choice. But I'd like to think that when it comes right down to the brass tax, you're really just pretending.

I didn't give him the badge; I don't have that capacity. I did, however, point-out to our local mod God a thread where Luminon had essentially claimed deism for himself and suggested that this was cause for a theist label. He agreed.

I'd PM either a high level mod or one of the core members if you're interested in the superfan label, iwbiek.

 

The thread that invoked the theist stamp is right here, the specific statement as follows:

 

When I had read this, I wanted to scream. How many times should I write that I never considered this one as a moving object? Not fast, certainly. The hands of a photographer were shaky because of a cold. The main photo shows a conditions highly polluted by light, which effectively filters out any stars, but the object is still visible. The details on the right are from another photographs. I write it again - the object was a single spot, the line is caused by a shaky hands and a prolonged photographic exposition.
As for an optical effect, I have it photographed from multiple places on the street. This is one of them:
DSCN0342.JPG (scroll down, wait for a countdown, enter the appeared text into a rectangle, then push the orange button and download the 2MB original photo)
 

Kevin and iwbiek: The most funny thing is, that the post which tipped Kevin's scales was NOT AIMED AT ANYONE, certainly not myself It was rather a speculation about some implications of atheism. I don't believe that in case of a scientific proof of any God, the former atheists would turn to be a typical theists, who visits churches. Instead, I'd expect they would reject the practice of worship itself as a primitive thing, they would mainly live a good life not trying to climb up the hypothetical God's ass, as it is in that Marcus Aurelius' quote. I asked if such an approach has a name. Kevin called that Deism, and he somehow applied it to me, calling me Deist, and Deism is a form of theism.
But Kevin is not educated to recognize who and what I am, probably nobody on this forum is. During history, there was a rather blurry line between science, religion and esoteric knowledge. While the first two are deeply known here, esotericism isn't, and most of comments on it are as precise, as on atheists eating babies. While today most of people knows a difference between science and religion, they doesn't know the difference between religion and esotericism. I have no idea how to introduce such an extremely vast paradigm properly, (I also feel no need to convert anyone) but if there should be an extremely simplified, booby-summary of the most basic and fundamental implications of it, then go for I.A.G.A.Y.'s posts and then watch What the BLEEP do we know 1 and 2 with your left brain hemisphere turned off. I may be weak at science, even worse in any kind of religion, (specially organized) but I am good at esotericism. This forum is not accustomed for it, but it's not barred either. Either way, I'm not your typical fellow atheist, nor your typical Christian neighbour, but I wish you both to live long and prosper But more to the atheist. Christians had a free pass for the last 2000 years.

I don't know about Kevin, but to me Luminon comes off as a new age mysticist, believing in a hodge podge of nonsense like kirlian photography, alien visitors, the planet Nibiru, ghosts, phychic powers, and astrology. I would imagine that he also believes in the hollow earth, Derro, spirit guides, a Roswell/Area 51 conspiracy, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Mothman, the Jersey Devil, Unicorns, Smurfs, Care Bears, and Rainbow Bright.

Doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognise bullshit, so I imagine that just about everyone here is educated enough to realize that Lum suffers from a terminal case of recto-cranial inversion.

Actually, iwbiek, an acquaintance of mine one wrote a large investigative piece on the 'mothman' phenomena, and more or less conclusively laid-out the case that what people had seen was either a Gold or Bald Eagle. The first people to report sighting 'mothman' were not familiar with larger birds of prey in North America, and after the first sightings, it was all just mimic behavior.

I actually had the document kicking-around in one of my Yahoo mailboxboxes a while ago... I'll see if I can find it for you.

definitely send it my way if you find it.  i don't think any of my family believes it either, though it makes them uneasy, especially since they knew people who died in that bridge collapse.

seems like i read a similar theory, but it said it was maybe a crane or stork of some kind.