Bret in Long Island sent this report:
At just before 4:00pm EST on the Fox cable news channel in Long Island New York, I saw many rods flying around on one of the stationary night vision cameras that they have set up in Baghdad Iraq. I wasn't sure what I was seeing at first but then I saw some very clear images of several of them flying slowly in front of the camera. Some even flew in a very similar circular pattern just like the ones that I have seen in videos at the coast to coast web site. The very distinctive spiral "oscillating wings" are amazingly clear during this footage. The footage lasted for several minutes and then switched away before I could get a tape of it. Hopefully you can acquire a copy of this footage and see this great footage for yourself.
I captured some still images (see below) from one of my video tapes taken today just before 1PM Pacific (Thursday 4/3/03- on Fox News' war coverage of Baghdad) The stills from the camcorder picture taken of my TV set I am including, show a virtually "perfect" shaped "Rod" that flew across the picture, left to upper right.
As you can see, the so-called "rod" is a very interesting sinusoidal pattern recording several cycles of signal that I suspect are an optical/video effect created when a close, out-of-focus and highly illuminated insect flies in front of the TV camera lens, which is focused at infinity. The defocused "blob" becomes altered by this process, the result being a shape that is related to the light wavelength and video sampling rate and the speed of travel. Beautiful effect. This is, in fact, a BETTER rendering of a "rod" than any of the ones I've seen on various websites (at least to judge from the VHS tape, if not the JPEGs).
I don't care if people think this is a "creature" even though I am not persuaded myself -- *I* think it is a fantastically beautiful, weird, and fascinating optical/video artifact.
--Steve W.
For more on the Rods phenomenon check out Jose Escamilla's website.
http://www.roswellrods.com/pre.html