The Kolkata Shape-Shifting Light Filmed by Farhan Akhtar

Kolkata, West Bengal. October 2007. Diwali was ten days away. Farhan Akhtar lived high up in a flat in east Kolkata, on the 9th floor by one account and the 10th by another. He was deputy general manager of H&R Johnson, a tile maker, and not the Bollywood actor and director who shares his name. His window faced east. The flat was near the airport, and he knew what the planes looked like.

Monday, 29 October 2007. Early morning. Akhtar got up to get a drink of water. When he went to draw the curtains, he saw "something that looked like an abnormally big star at a 30 degree angle in the sky."

He reached for his Sony DVD handycam and zoomed in. Through the lens, the star became something else. He described "a white ball with flaming sides which changed colour and shape after few minutes and seemed dotted with red bulbs but with a white patch in the middle." It kept changing. "Soon it began to resemble a Jaguar-shaped plane with a blue flame at the top and yellow and green in between. At times it acquired a cylindrical shape." He was sure it was not a plane.

According to DNA India, he filmed from 3.20 am till 5.40 am. The object stayed visible until about 6:20 am, when daylight made filming harder. Other accounts give 3:30 to 6:30 am. A local blogger wrote that people gathered along the E.M. Bypass to watch.

The footage aired on Indian TV news channels. Viewers saw the light shift from a round object to a triangle to a straight line. It emitted a bright light forming a halo and radiated a range of colours. The Times of India ran the story as "UFO puzzle has city in a tizzy." It was reported as the first UFO caught on camera in the city.

Kolkata air traffic control had "no information from the radar controller on the sighting of such an object, nor did any pilot report anything irregular." Weather balloons were ruled out. The Met department logs its launches. None was logged that day.

Debiprasad Duari, director of the M.P. Birla Planetarium, first called it "extremely interesting and strange." Then he leaned toward an optical illusion, "a result of cloud reflecting city lights." He said it "could just be digital trickery as no natural phenomenon can last that long and change its colour and shape so rapidly." He weighed Venus, which sat in the eastern sky, and Comet Holmes. He doubted both.

Kamalesh Kar, an astro-particle physicist at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, was more cautious. "A cosmic body cannot change its appearance the way this one seemed to do. But an expert needs to observe it for a longer period of time to be able to comment on it."

The blog Drishtikone accused Duari of double-speak, asking how the object could be both unnatural and a trick of refraction. No evidence of tampering was ever presented. One later wiki entry states that Duari ultimately identified the light as Venus, though his reported words only raised it as a possibility. The footage was never formally checked against the sky.

The case lives on in lists of India's strangest sightings, where it is sometimes told as two fireballs, or as a light seen by hundreds. A children's news site called it "celestial fireworks" before Diwali. The original recording has not surfaced online. What remains is a man at his window before dawn, and a star that would not hold its shape.