As Celebrity Cruises and other U.S. based cruise lines begin to resume operations, the captain of the Celebrity Edge created a stir earlier this week when a cruise related website posted a video on its Facebook page of what the captain described as an UFO cruising right over the ship.
Captain Kate McCue originally took short videos of the incident which she posted in June of 2020 (a year ago) on her TikTok page and July of last year on her Instagram page. The video from her TikTok page, with the theme song of the Twilight Zone playing in the background, is shown below.
@captainkatemccue Strange sighting at sea #ufo #strangerthings #fyp #foryoupage #celebrityedge #unknown #sighting
♬ The Twilight Zone (Main Theme) – The Soundtrack Studio Stars
The more recent Facebook posting shows a slightly different video (below). Captain McCue describes the incident in front of a crowd of cruise guests. She states that the UFO “sailed” or “floated” or was “cruising” above the cruise ship:
“. . . and I have a drone on board, so I thought it would be a good night to catch a sunset. I had a drone in my hand, and someone said: ‘what’s that?’ and we look up and there was – I put it on TikTok – it looked like a black jellyfish, a gigantic back jellyfish, and it sailed right over the retreat, directly through the center-line of the ship, right through the center line of the ship, right through our “X” in our stack and just floated though. The thing is, we had no wind, maybe 5 knots at the time, but this thing was cruising along about 10-15 miles per hour, just cruised right over, and as its passed the stern of the ship, it went a couple hundred meters, maybe three or four hundred meters, and then it started to descend into the water. But because it was sunset we couldn’t put a rescue boat down to see what it was, but it disappeared into the water, and we had no idea . . . it wasn’t a drill, there was no noise associated with it. So if you want to see our UFO, it was on TikTok.” (crowd applauds)
Under the caption “UFO’s Are Back,” the captain posted a similar video from a different angle on Instagram a year earlier.
One of the videos was also posted on Reddit where some people people expressed their skepticism. Many seemed to conclude that the UFO was actually a partially deflated balloon drifting over the cruise ship. Reddit user Alphaste posted:
“I do not see the Gigantic black jellyfish. Just what appears to me to be the usual out-of-focus blur, that is probably a deflating and descending balloon reflecting the sunlight. It surprises me that this individual does not understand that there are relatively strong airstreams higher up that would explain the non-spectacular motion of this object.”
Another Reddit user, Ceeejnew, posted: “It would be more convincing if it did some high speed maneuvers that are more . . . unbaloonlike.”
This is not the first time that a video posted by Captain McCue made our selection for our “Weird Cruise News” section. In June of 2016, Celebrity Master McCue posted on her Instagram page a videotape of a Falcon 50 jet making a low high speed pass close to the Celebrity Summit. (The video of the jet buzzing the cruise ship was taken by Captain Frederic and then posted by Captain McCue). The jet rattled the nerves of several passengers on the ship. The spectacular video of the encounter was one of several videos of jets buzzing Celebrity and Royal Caribbean ships at high speeds which made our “weird news” category several years ago.
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Image credit: Captain Kate McKune Instagram and TikTok pages; Facebook post – Cruise Reviews page.