So much for aliens landing in Chelsea.
That unexplained object that hovered mysteriously over the neighborhood Wednesday may be nothing more than errant party balloons, experts said today.
One theory being floated is that the UFO was actually balloons that escaped from an engagement party they held for a Westchester County teacher.
“It was just a freak thing. Frankly I’m shocked by it,” Angela Freeman, head of the Milestone School in Mount Vernon, who says her school inadvertently sent a cluster of balloons aloft.
“We didn’t send them up. The kids had an engagement part for a teacher and a mother brought four dozen balloons and she’s coming through the door, it is very windy in Mount Vernon, suddenly 12 of the balloons let loose.”
In January 2009, a science teacher and his friend in Morristown, N.J. used fishing line, flares, and three-foot helium balloons to fool people into thinking they witnessed a UFO.
“It had the flavor of a cluster of balloons, in my opinion,” said Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center, a private research group based in Washington.
But, he stressed the footage was too funny to make a definitive opinion.
Another theory raging online was the objects were balloons released Wednesday in Times Square for the 100th Anniversary of Madrid’s Gran Via, known at the “Spanish Broadway of Europe.”
The National Weather Service said the objects whose appearance brought parts of western Manhattan to a standstill were definitely not weather balloons.
“Our weather balloons are launched at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.,” said Brian Ciemnecki, a NWS staff meteorologist. “Sometimes weather balloons are mistaken for UFO, but this was not a weather balloon.”