Metro

UFO Spotted Over Williamsburg, Hipsters Shrug

In the borough that isn’t surprised by anything, an unidentified flying object that flew over Williamsburg in late January is raising little alarm.

It may be a hoax, and in all likelihood it probably is, but several videos of a small, round object streaking in an arc across an ink-black sky have been circulating with moderate frenzy on the Brooklyn blogs McBrooklyn, FreeWilliamsburg, Gothamist, Vos Iz Neias, and even WPIX Channel 11.

The first video to capture the UFO was shot on January 25 and uploaded to YouTube by Williamsburg resident and artist Tina DeRamus. Her video captures the image of a baseball-sized object hurtling above her as she zooms her camera into clearer focus.

“I’m still having a hard time digesting all of it so I don’t really expect others to automatically believe me, but I can promise you that I don’t know any special effects tricks and I don’t play around with L.E.D. toys,” DeRamus told this paper, adding that she’s filmed more since that day in January.

It is far from the first time that a UFO has been detected in Brooklyn in recent history, and if the reports tell us anything, it is that aliens love Brooklyn’s bridges. Several videos shot during the summer of 2007 recorded orbs flying over the Williamsburg Bridge, though one is listed as a “special effects experiment,” while another Web site noted a UFO sighting over the Verrazano Bridge in 2003.

The most recent UFO abduction in the borough, detailed in several newspaper reports and a book by UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, described how aliens hovered in a reddish-orange spacecraft over the Brooklyn Bridge on November 30, 1989, while beaming Brooklyn resident Linda Cortile from the window of her 12th floor apartment building at approximately 3 AM. Cortile returned to her building later that night unharmed.

Despite meager evidence of intergalactic vehicles touching down in Brooklyn, Borough President Marty Markowitz has already embraced the would-be visitors, claiming that the “creative attire, hair colors, and eclectic body art of our more artistic Williamsburg residents” is evidence that there is already “very fashionable extraterrestrial life walking among us.”

“But seriously, I would be thrilled if those from other planets would choose Brooklyn as their gateway to planet Earth. We are a city of immigrants, and when I say Brooklyn is proud home to everyone from everywhere, I really mean everywhere!” said Markowitz.

Community Board 1 Public Safety and Extraterrestrial Relations Chair Mieszko Kalita assured Brooklyn residents not to be alarmed at a possible alien invasion. For one thing, the spacecraft spotted in the winter sky is quite small, which means that it likely contains small aliens.

“If there’s more than one, they’re pretty tiny,” said Kalita. “They will be hard to arrest, considering the size of the handcuffs from the NYPD, but still they can be contained easily, possibly in a glass jar. Therefore I don’t think it is a huge problem. Their ships can be used in a league game.”

Much remains unanswered. Could previous aliens be returning to visit Brooklyn 20 years later to pick up a pizza at Grimaldi’s and a Junior’s cheesecake to go? Or perhaps new aliens be looking to settle in a spacious two-bedroom loft apartment Williamsburg and adopt the hipster aesthetic? Stuff Hipsters Hate blogger Brenna Ehrlich thinks that younger Williamsburg residents barely notice the aliens, which would assimilate with the population easily.

“Aliens would probably be cool to party with, though, unless they chose to kill us all,” said Ehrlich.

ashort@cnglocal.com