“What is that scary thing?” her mother asked. Mathilde Prins from Hengelo didn’t know either. She had taken a nice photo of the moon, she thought, but when she zoomed in she saw something completely different. “Quite a bit creepy.” Mathilde Prins (56) took the photo of the moon and the strange thing on Tuesday 15 October 2024. At the end of the afternoon, shortly before six. Just outside, in Tuindorp. Spontaneously, she hadn’t planned it. “My son said: ‘Mom, there’s a beautiful moon to be seen.’” Prins grabbed her camera and took a photo of the moon, which was indeed very photogenic in the sky. It wasn’t until she uploaded the photo to her laptop that she saw it. Look now, Mathilde Prins thought in surprise when she zoomed in on the photo. What is that? There’s a kind of capsule hanging next to the moon. “My mother said: what is that scary thing?” She has a total of three photos showing ‘the thing’, each in a slightly different place. “I don’t see anything in the photos before and after.” Did she also see nothing when she took the photo? “Yes, I thought I saw a cloud. But it was more like nothing than something. How high was that, people ask me. Yes, about as high as an airplane, but who knows how high an airplane flies?” What is it? She posted the photos of the moon and the strange thing on Facebook, because maybe someone knows what it is. “Beautiful moon, tap the photo and you will see something strange in the picture, what is it? I don’t know myself and the lens is clean and the photo was taken outside,” she wrote. Since then, the messages and friend requests have been pouring in. The phone has been red hot, so to speak. Prins received a message from a journalist, among others, who seriously wants to submit the photo to a UFO researcher. "He wants to have the photo examined, exposed differently and so on. That's fine with me." But other believers are also coming forward. "I also get very strange messages from mediums, who ask, for example, if I've ever had a miscarriage. I don't respond to that." 'My photos are all natural' She also gets technical questions about the photo that she can't answer. "I take photos with a Panasonic Lumix DMC fz300. On automatic mode, then I know for sure that it will go well. I've only been taking photos for a year and a half, so I don't know that much about it." Has the photo been edited? No, says Prins. "My photos are all natural, they are on the memory card. This was just a stupid photo of the moon, nothing else. People also say it's a shaver, or ask if I was standing inside behind the window. No, I was standing in the garden." And apart from that small inconspicuous cloud, there was nothing to see. “My sister asked: why didn’t you zoom in on it? But I only saw a… something. But actually more of a nothing.” Creepy It became more than something when she looked at the photo more closely. She finds the photo fascinating, she says. Every time she looks at it, she wonders what it is. “It’s not a helium balloon. What it is, I have no idea. It’s quite creepy.” Does she think it’s a UFO? “I don’t know. That hocus-pocus of those mediums, I don’t believe it at all. I’m much too down-to-earth for that. But UFOs? It could be possible.” Another report What Mathilde Prins photographed in the sky above Hengelo on October 15 remains a mystery for a while. What is remarkable is that a report was received on the website ufomeldpunt.nl that same day. The report came from Zwolle around noon. A witness saw ‘a grey spherical (oval) capsule, fairly high in the air’. It had no lights, made no sound and flew from east to west. Is Mathilde Prins’s photo a joke, a balloon, a spot on the lens, a technical defect? Or was there really a capsule-shaped UFO flying above Overijssel? The Hengelo resident doesn’t know. “It’s a bit strange and a bit scary. Just call it a thing.”
Looks like a regular high-altitude baloon before getting to an altitude where it can fully expand. Nothing too special and there are a bunch of them used every day for weather prediction. As for not seeing it with naked eye, it's pretty hard to notice dim objects next to something as bright as the full moon unless you are looking for them.
Yeah you can see a long string hanging off of it. Looks like some sort of balloon. It does look creepy though haha.
