Air rods, also called "flying rods" and "sky fish," are something like crop circles in that even the skeptics admit they exist. The only question is what they really are. Invisible to the eye, they are picked up by cameras all over the world. Are they living creatures, alien probes, or some sort of 3D electromagnetic smudge? To believers in the cryptozoology-based theory of air rods, air rods are probably living creatures, and they are possibly related to older stories of atmospheric beasts. To skeptics, air rods are bits of flying debris, insects or birds filmed under unusual conditions, or blips on film that are due to errors in film processing.
Air rods were discovered in the 1990s. People found that some films of all types, ranging from home videos to movies seen in theaters, had odd disturbances that looked something like blurry rods that were mostly transparent, occasionally whitish in color. Most of these disturbances were fast-moving and barely visible to the eye. These rods showed up best against large areas of the same color, such as the sky.
The people who examined films for anomalies of this sort started calling what they did "sky fishing" because they usually started by looking at the areas of sky that were visible in films. They found that these rods were widespread. Countless films had them lurking almost imperceptibly in the corners, including old television shows, movies, films of sporting events, almost everything imaginable. There were simply too many examples to study them all, running into the thousands or tens of thousands. There were also air rods visible in photographs, but these were hardly studied at all for reasons that will become clear below.
Close study of air rod films revealed a number of very interesting features. As these rods zoomed about, they displayed all the features of three-dimensional objects. In other words, they were not two-dimensional blotches on the camera lens or on the film itself, but something out there in the environment that was actually being filmed by accident. This three-dimensional nature of air rods has been proven without a doubt by the types of measurements and tests that only professionals can do. Careful measurements showed that most rods were between four inches and three feet long. They seemed like uniform cylinders without any difference between the head end and tail end, with pairs of appendages along the length of this cylinder.
In some air rods, these appendages look like fins that vibrate rapidly along the entire length of the cylinder in undulating waves. Other rods have appendages that look more like very rapidly beating bee wings. Most of the time, rods are blurry and transparent in color, making them inconspicuous. A rare few are more white in color, sometimes an even, solid white. The cylinder part often resembles an out-of-focus hair on the camera lens, but the appendages along with the three-dimensional turnings and motions mean that genuine air rods cannot possibly be hairs on the camera lens.
In addition to their three-dimensional character, these rods seemed to act in intelligent ways. Sometimes several rods followed each other and seemed to play with each other in the manner that butterflies might play. Rods sometimes followed people. They never went through other objects, they always went around them, even when this meant deviating from the path they had been on before. This seemed to indicate that they could not pass through solid objects and that they might be alive.
However, if they were living creatures, why had people never seen them? Why did they only show up on film? And what could they possibly be made of?
People were scared and shocked when they realized that rods might be living creatures, so the first thing they did was try to disprove this by showing that air rods were something normal that simply showed up on film in an odd way. They already had solid proof that rods were not two-dimensional blotches on the film. This meant that rods could be insects, birds, or something else that was somehow blurred weirdly as it was being filmed. However, all attempts to deliberately create air rod footage by filming insects and birds in odd ways failed to produce anything that matched the features of rods. Airborne debris, such as bits of straw, also failed to duplicate air rods. The most studied air rod films showed air rods swooping within a dozen feet of the camera, coming close to the ground and going between objects with nearby trees and bushes visible behind the air rods, so that they couldn't be long, thin birds or precise lines of insects seen in the distance, as some skeptics claimed.
