Unidentified Floating (And Maybe Also Fallen) Object

Poul Anderson, The Man Who Counts IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1978), pp. 140-265.

The characters in Chapter I, have wings and tails so they are not human although they do have all too familiar emotions and motivations.

One of them has seen an unfamiliar floating object carrying three wingless, tailless but clothed animals:

"'...like typical flightless land forms, except for having only four limbs.'" (p. 143)

We begin to recognize these intruders who are not fish, sea mammals or adapted for swimming and therefore maybe fell from the sky.

Decades ago, I read a comic strip about a UFO scare among bipedal Martians. One of them described being chased by a flying saucer and we saw what he described. The UFO's were thought to have come from Earth but there were fantastic and incompatible accounts of what the extra-Martians looked like. Right at the end of the story, what we recognized as a spacecraft landed and what we recognized as space-suited Earthmen emerged from it. Something similar is happening here although without the UFO scare first.