www.thegilmours.co.uk

Well we pushed our website visitor numbers to an all time high last week, with the publication of a hoax about sighting a UFO over Santiago.

For those that missed it, you can scroll down and find the unusual (aka rubbish) photographs of the eclipse of the moon, visible in Santiago in March. As noted, i have Mandy to thank for that and a couple of beers. The latter may have inspired the webexperiment!
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So, how many people actually searched for UFOs in the last week and managed to find us?
343 over 7 days
How many people also read our front page (for more than 10 seconds)?
163 and, incredibly, another 180 by RSS feed
How many hits did we get in the last 7 days? (this includes robots and indexing hits)
3700
How many hits did we get on the day the blog was published?
523! Up from an average of 200 a day, around 30% normally robots and 40 unique IP addresses
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In the words of the Beatles, we ask “All the lonely people, where do they come from?”
Over 50% from the US, 35% from California alone! No surprises there….Roswell, Area 52, 51 and 746 not enough for you, eh?
4% was lower than normal (as a % of total)- come on you folk! Spread the word!
2% from Australia- thanks Dave & Jemima!

Well, a memorable week in the life of thegilmours.co.uk…. a lot of fun.

We’ll run another webexperiment soon, probably relating to 2ndLife or Chilean pies.

On the 14th March we enjoyed an evening with our friends David and Anne, close to the Prince of Wales country club, Las Condes, Santiago. David produced a wonderful salmon with lemon and butter sauce on the BBQ and we were entertained by their kids Nicky and Mandy.

After the meal, Mandy alerted us to a light in the sky that she could not explain.

An Unidentified Flying Object (UFO), we joked…. but when we stepped into the garden to view it, through nearby trees, we were very surprised to see not just a single light, but several, rising into the sky.

Tell-tale signs were, of course, bright visible light from the underside of a disk-shaped metallic object. We could also distinguish several lights from its belly, which we assumed were produced by several motors which were strangely quiet, sounding like your ears do after a long mobile phone call- a high frequency tone, barely detectable from a distance.

Most strikingly, the object moved, both rapidly and randomly in the sky. With gasps of “Que raro!” or “increible”, we watched as it made several turns in the sky, rising and falling against the dark shades of the mountains around.

Fumbling around in the dark, i found my camera and started snapping photos which i now post below.

A spanish version of this account can be found below.

El 14 de Marzo, disfrutamos mucho un asado con nuestros quieridos amigos David y Anne a su casa cerca de Club Principe de Gales, Las Condes, Santiago. David cocinó una muy buena salmon, cocido con mantequilla y limon por el asadero. Y sus niños, Nicky y Mandy nos divertieron como siempre!

Después de comer, la Mandy nos advertío a un luz subiendo por arriba de la cuidad hacia al oriente (la precordillera) de Santiago.

Un objeto volador no identificado bromeamos, pero, cuando pasabamos por el jardin para verlo a través de los arboles, lo nos sorpresamos de ver no solo un luz blanco y brillante, pero unos luces subiendo al cielo, con una altura menos de 1000m.

El objeto, como se pudiera anticiparse, tuvo algunos luces brillantes radiando de abajo de un objecto parecido de un disco metallico que, pensamos, debía ser los motores. Pero fueron motores especiales que no produjieron sonido dentro del rango de oir. Lo sentimos como el sonido de olas de alta frequencia.

Más sorprendente, se pasaba por el cielo con movimientos muy rapidos, bruscos y por direcciónes al azar. Dijimos “que raro!” y “que increible” como lo veíamos subir y bajar en los cielos.

Encontré mi camera y sacamos algunos fotos del objecto volador no identificado (OVNI, OSI, UFO, ONI cualquiera que los llaman ustedes) que podrá encontrar arriba en una ficha/presentación. Bienvenido a www.thegilmours.co.uk.

It’s 6am UK time. 1.50am Chile time.

Our weather indicator in the right-hand menu bar reads as follows:
# Temp: 12°C
# Humidity: 82%
# Wind: Varies at 2 mph
# Dew Point: 9°C
# Barometer: 30.06″ Hg (1018 hPa)
# Clouds: clear skies
# Conditions: smoke
# Visibility: 3.1 miles

Eh? I think they mean smog. Dangerous photo-chemical stuff too. I’m encouraged to hear there are clear skies up there somewhere….

This has been a hard Easter. I never like admitting things like this on a blog, but then that is what it is for. Honest admissions and fair reflections and all that…

Rachel has been up the mountain for 7 days now and it happens to be the quietest week in Santiago. I miss her and our families. Even our Santiago friends are away or unavailable at the moment. I have little work to do and everyone else is celebrating Easter today (as is the Catholic tradition) and watching movies starring Jesus and Moses. No, really. They live for these movies at Easter time, despite them dating from the 1960s. No Tom and Jerry for the kids this morning…. just Jesus, wearing sandles and bad make-up.

Living in a foreign land is difficult at times. I think i’m feeling more isolated than ever before in Chile. With technology like Skype and MSN you might think it is getting easier, but the technology of sleep hasn’t changed, so the UK goes to bed as we start our evening.

They’ve been long quiet evenings this week… not something i’m accustomed to nor something I have ever really liked. You know me… hyper-Doug, party-goer, hiker and horticulturalist. Or Horrid Boy (Auntie Dorothy). Handyman and hen-pecked are debatable too!

Today, the city is dead- hardly any cars on the road nor pedestrians. It is like everyone has vapourised or something. But this has two wonderful consequences- the air is clean thus the view of the mountains is magic, and the silence is bliss (bar the odd car alarm).

Back to my book then…. “Is religion dangerous?” by Prof Keith Ward.

Another Jeffer has come into the world! Congratulations to Paul and Joyce on the birth of Elsie Jeffers, in Antofagasta, northern Chile. 2 weeks earlier than forecast but safe and sound. All well. 2.75kg and just 49cm long! Will she one day reach the cloudy heights of Paul (6ft 3in)?!