A UFO in Moscow? Russian Protesters Say Yes, Others No

Was there a legitimate UFO sighting in Russia or a hyped-up one?

According to reports, someone among a throng of people captured a video on Saturday of what 25,000 pro-democracy protesters in Moscow's Bolotnaya Square believed to be a UFO hovering over the crowd. The demonstration, the largest seen in Russia in years, accused Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's party of stealing the recent parliamentary elections.

Witnesses said the unidentified flying object had reflecting blue and red lights and five extended tendrils or pylons emanating from the body of the vehicle, unlike a regular helicopter.

However, according to Vitaliy Matveev of Russian news site RT.com, the UFO was actually a drone camera launched by Russia's Ridus news agency, an independent community of civilian journalists, which is becoming increasingly popular among Russian bloggers.

Being among those tens of thousands of 'confused onlookers,' the only kind of debate I can recall in regards to the 'object' was whether it was the police monitoring the security situation on the scene of mass protests through a drone camera or journalists taking aerial photos for their reports (or broadcasts), said Matveev. Despite standing quite far from the place above which the drone was hovering, I could still clearly see what it was, and so could the others. Needless to say, nobody was really 'distracted by the UFO,' as MailOnline assumes, provided more important distractions were unfolding on the ground.

Matveev references the Daily Mail, which first reported the apparent UFO sighting and quoted paranormal writer Michael Cohen saying, NASA recently admitted that there is a good chance that aliens are monitoring our civilization through the use of 'unmanned' probes.

Disproving the UFO theory further, Matveev pointed out that the Ridus drone camera hovering above Bolotnaya Square took pictures of the protests, which Reuters claimed and instantly spread throughout the Internet. Ironically enough, Matveev said, the Daily Mail published one of the pictures in their initial report with the following caption: An aerial view of the rally in Bolotnaya Square during the protest in which the alleged UFO sighting was made.