The Weyauwega Twilight Disc
On a February evening in 2003, a mother photographing her son sledding in the small town of Weyauwega pointed her digital camera at a ring of cycling lights passing overhead and captured two of the cleanest disc photos of the early digital era. Four years later, two more photos of what looks like the same craft surfaced from near Green Bay, an hour east. Nobody has ever put a name to either camera.
What did witnesses see at Weyauwega?
The witness reported that she and her son were visiting a friend just north of Main Street, east of Highway 110 and south of the train tracks. As darkness fell her son pointed out lights approaching from the southwest. She raised the camera and took two shots as the object passed nearly overhead and moved south toward the tracks. She said the lights cycled through different patterns and that the shape read as a disc rather than a balloon. The first frame shows a washed-out circular object with three bright white lights and a small red light behind bare branches. In January 2007 an email contact of investigator Jack Nethering sent two photos her husband reportedly took near Green Bay showing a similar disc with a ring of multicolored underside lights.
More footage and images of this sighting
What is the official explanation?
No government or law enforcement involvement is on record. The only formal evaluations are civilian: UFO Wisconsin's photographic analysis found JPEG compression artifacts consistent with a low-end digital camera, the object apparently behind foreground branches, and no obvious signs of digital tampering such as masking traces or paintbrush smears. The case was reported in the 26 February 2003 issue of UFO Roundup and on UFOWisconsin.com.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The photographer remained anonymous, citing privacy. UFO Wisconsin noted on 24 February 2003 that she had stopped responding to emails and left no contact information, so the investigation could never be completed. The Green Bay 2007 photographer is likewise anonymous and second-hand.
Is the Weyauwega Twilight Disc real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, provenance and image: the chain is real and short. The photos went to UFO Wisconsin in February 2003 (their files date the frames to 1 February), were analyzed publicly that month, and have circulated unchanged since. The analysis points the right direction: consistent JPEG blocking, plausible depth of field, the object reading as behind the branches. Pass two, counter-explanations: at Metabunk, Mick West demonstrated in about ten minutes that the behind-the-branches effect is trivial to fake by compositing, so that feature carries no evidential weight, and another poster noted the red and green lights match aircraft navigation colors. No negatives exist, the camera was never examined, and the witness vanished. Verdict: a genuinely unexplained pair of images with a sincere-looking report, but anonymous provenance and an easily replicable signature cap it permanently at Unknown. The 2007 Green Bay companion photos, with even weaker second-hand provenance, ride along as supporting media rather than their own case.
Sources
- www.ufowisconsin.com/county/reports2003/analysisweyauwegaphotos.html
- www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case260.htm
- web.archive.org/web/20130408231437/http://www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/recent/Photo416.htm
- www.metabunk.org/threads/green-bay-wisconsin-weyauwega-ufos-2003-and-2007.12003/
- www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12284045/The-6-compelling-UFO-photos-WORLD-Turkey-Costa-Rica-Wisconsin.html
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in USA
