What’s better than a story about a blurry, grainy, out of focus overly-zoomed in photo of a UFO?
Stories that don’t even have pictures.
We have two — yes, count e’m, TWO — stories of UFOs seen with no footage, just eyewitness reports. The first comes from Texas, where two women describe what they saw a few nights ago: a bright light moving across the sky, that suddenly disappeared after making a sharp turn.
It sounds like what they saw was an airplane in the distance, reflecting the Sun (the article says they saw it "at night", but doesn’t specify early evening or any specific time). When an airplane is so far away it appears as a point of light, it can dim very rapidly — making it disappear — as it turns and changes its aspect to a viewer. I’ve seen this effect many times. I’m not saying this is what they saw for sure, but it sounds likely.
The second story is, if anything, worse than the first. This time it was in Alabama, and the descriptions make it sound pretty much like they saw a meteor heading toward the horizon. One witness said:
“When it was coming through the sky, I really thought it was an airplane that lost control so I came to a complete stop on the road. When I got out and looked at it was no sound coming from it.”
No sound, and he says it didn’t appear to be an aircraft.
“It speed up to maybe two hundred miles per hour it went straight to the ground and disappeared.”
Remember, when anybody gives a distance, size, or speed, you can almost be 100% positive they are wrong. Without knowing the distance, you cannot judge the size or speed, and if you don’t know the size, you can’t know the distance. So the witness was just guessing; this happens all the time in such reports. But this report sounds precisely like a meteor, and most people have little or no experience with bright bolides, so they can be fooled easily.
Let em say this clearly, too: I have no issue with people who think they have seen UFOs. What bugs me are credulous news stations that report these things without talking to someone who actually knows anything about this! In both cases, that would have helped immensely.
As usual with tales of UFOs, tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Fark.
April 28th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Phil, I’m sorry to say this but the explanation of the first encounter is not good, plus you wrote “too women” instead of “two women”.
Anyway, back to the subject. Have you ever heard of Jaime Maussan?
April 28th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
“Sudden turns” can easily be observed when a object that is heading toward or away from an object makes a turn (and in the extreme cases with something like a missile.) While certainly not conclusive, it seems like a slightly (?) more likely explanation than a UFO. Its hard to tell whether or not this person meant “sudden” in the unexpected sense or sudden in the too-fast-for-a-normal-plane sense.
April 28th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
UFO”S ARE REAL !!!
It’s the explanations that are suspect…
April 28th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
How can someone be “too women”? I mean, if she (or he, as the case may be) were too much woman for you, how do you know she would be for me, too? Besides, using “too” and “women” to describe one person is a bit redundant, don’t you think? (I do two!)
April 28th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
The new season on Big Brother started down under (It was my wife’s birthday so she had the remote and she knew that Mythbusters was a repeat), and one of the house mates is a UFO observer. They showed a photo he had taken with a puprle smudge that had been anaylsied not to be a photographic defect.
My wife an I were thinking more in line with a plastic bag.
At least the hosts were not taking him to seriously.
April 28th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
The first concern of the media is to sell their newspaper, ad space, and commercial air time. They do this by grabbing interest. Which is more interesting to most people: “Meteorite Streaks Across Alabama Skys” or “UFO Reported Over Alabama?” I suspect the reason they didn’t call an observatory in the last instance is that they had confirmation from the pilots that it was a meteor.
The first instance doesn’t give the time of night. If it was around dusk, there’s a cool phenomena with low-orbit satellites. They get real brilliant as the sun is reflected right at you, then within seconds they seem to disappear.
April 28th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Maybe I’m just lucky, but my local newscasters usually put these stories at the end of the program before they sign-off with a chuckle. If it’s in the local newspaper, we might read it and snigger because they’re local folks. But when CNN gets a hold on it, Hotdog! It’s Halloween 1938 (well, almost) all over again!
April 28th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
I’ve been watching satellites since my dad took me out to see Echo-1 in 1960. I take my kids out all of the time to see the ISS and various other satellite passes (we even have had the chance to talk to MIR, various shuttles and the ISS over Amateur Radio, anyone can hear the ISS with a scanner).
Visible satellites are pretty easy to research:
http://www.heavens-above.com/
Early morning and early evening +- ~1-2 hours dawn / dusk are the best times.
Some of the coolest passes are when a shuttle or re-supply ship is going/coming from the ISS. You see two objects one trailing the other.
Other interesting objects that are quite bright (”flare”) for a few seconds are the Iridium satellites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_(satellite)
April 28th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
I once saw a true Flying Saucer. It was hovering silently over the vacant ground in front of our house, with the moonlight shining softly on its upper surface and a row of lights like windows.
My mind pointed out that I was facing a large international airport about ten miles away, but my eyes insisted it was a Flying Saucer. When it turned towards me the illusion was broken. The `moonlight’ was in part reflected off the top of the aircraft and in part the loom of its landing lights which were still turned on. The row of lights which looked like windows were, in fact, windows. Shortly afterwards it passed nearby and I could recognise, not only the aircraft, but also the airline as by this time the lights illuminating the rudder had been turned on.
However, I speculate what I would have seen if the aircraft had turned away from me rather than towards me. I suspect that the sudden foreshortening of the image would appear to be a very rapid retreat, far faster than any aircraft could go.
April 28th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Growing up in the military most of my life I have seen many things that the average person would call a “UFO”, the most common being parachute flares (like the sightings in ‘97 in Phoenix, Arizona for one…).
We’d see them all of the time at Ft. Bragg / Pope AFB. Some of the war games at night with flares, helicopters, close air support and night parachute drops would last for hours. Looked like a scene from Independence Day. You could see them 15 miles off the reservation, better than going to a drive in.
On the other hand, I have heard many stories from very experienced aviators that saw things in the sky with no obvious explanations. The WWII “Foo Fighters” have yet to be identified.
April 28th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Well, *I* have seen a UFO. Not a flying saucer, mind you: a UFO; a flying object I can’t identify. Positively, at least.
I think it was an airliner, caught in some sort of strange light-play with reflections and not forming contrails. It might have also turned while I was looking. This is what I think happened, but I don’t really know, so the flying object remains unidentified. ‘Cause it looked like a plane at start, with that long silvery shine planes often exhibit, but then became just a speck of white light in the pale blue sky and vanished. Not behind trees or anything: it was really high in the sky and there wasn’t a coud in sight.
This happened many years ago. My one and only UFO sighting.
April 28th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
I don’t understand these folks. When I see something weird in the sky, my first thought isn’t “OH MY GOD IT’S AN UFO!”
…Now, things I describe as “weird in the sky” are certainly UFO to me. But most of the time, these folks associate these with aliens. I sure don’t. It’s just… Something I can’t identify, and there’s a LOT of things coming before “MYSTERIOUS PHENOMENON FROM SCI FI!”
April 28th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
This has nothing to do with this post, sorry. I just read your review of Transformers. I LOVE Deborah Foreman. I could watch My Chauffer over and over. In fact, I think I will now!!
April 28th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
About a week ago at dusk I was pondering the sky (Venus had just started showing) and I saw a brilliant orange streak for around a half-second. It wasn’t the flash that was remarkable (almost certainly a meteor burning up,) but the color (as I said, brilliant orange rather than whitish). It was anywhere near the horizon where objects appear redder because of light wave variances.
While I don’t fully understand it, I realize it is because of my deficit of education on the subject rather than some paranormal phenomena. Why do people always assume the weirdest?
April 28th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Heh. I was writing this post up when Mrs. BA told me we had to go to get to Carolyn Porco’s talk on time, so I rushed the copy editing. I fixed the typo.
I’m not sure why, Juan, you say my description of the encounter isn’t very good. I was just summarizing it, and included a link to the story to get the details (sparse as they are). What about it was wrong?
April 28th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
As a long time pilot and sometimes amateur astronomer, I have seen a large number of unidentified objects in the air.
The one most memorable happened in the mid ’70s at Love field in Dallas. Love is surrounded by the city and even back then it was a very busy place. Still is – the home base of Southwest Airlines. Two long parallel runways, north-south and always with lots of traffic.
Our flying club was thinking of buying a used trainer from the Piper dealer and I had taken my lunch hour to go check it out.
As I was not very familiar with the Comanche I had my head in the cockpit more than I normally would. at about 1000 feet, I looked up and right in front of me I saw a large metallic sphere, hovering right over downtown Dallas.
For a second or two (it seemed longer) I began to rethink my entire world view and philosophy of life. Once I had my head back on and realized that it was not close – no apparent change of size – I relaxed and proceeded South in the general direction of the object.
It turned out to be a Goodyear blimp seen head on several miles away.
A known (but unexpected) object seen from an unusual angle, even in bright daylight can cause an experienced observer to completely misidentify it.
Think what can happen with a brief glimpse in dark or low visibility conditions.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Yes Juan, do tell, what is wrong with the first description? Seems logical to me, I’ve often seen this effect as well. However, I’m not a complete moron and don’t go screaming aliens in flying saucers; I do a bit of research to find the truth. But UFOs are a great story…if you’re not interested in the truth.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Maybe thirty years ago I was driving with my partner, and Venus was close to the horizon. “What’s that?” he said with considerable alarm. “That’s Venus.” “Oh. I thought it might be an Unidentified Flying Object.” “It was, till I told you it was Venus.” It always helps if the newspapers have people on staff with elementary knowledge of the physical world. But this doesn’t often happen: they just report the “news”.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Given that we don’t know what the objects were, but they were flying, doesn’t this mean they are UFOs by definition?
April 28th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
I should not have used the word “wrong”, its sounds like I’m criticizing it. Its just that I didn’t get what happened when I first read it. Don’t worry TWO much about
April 28th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
I only live about 15 miles from the Houston UFO site. The bridge where the sighting takes place is right over the ship channel and is in the heart of refinery land with its thousands of blinking lights. Several small airports are close by, plus Ellington field (the astronaut airfield) is close by as well (I could have said too or two). Probably a plane or a blinking refinery tower.
April 28th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
I had a good (if temporary) UFO experience while driving across the Arizona desert with my brother and a friend. We suddenly noticed a group of lights seemingly moving high over a line of mountains in front of us. It was about one AM, the sky was dark, and we clearly could see a “formation” of UFOs. Had we been more credulous, or stopped to simply observe the phenomena, we could have come away with memories of something very much like the endless string of “alien formation does impossible things before zooming out of sight” videos.
Instead, we kept driving, acknowledgeing only that we didn’t know what we were looking at. As we drove a few miles on, the lights began to exhibit a pattern of some kind, but we were still baffled as to their origin.
Soon enough, we realized that we were watching a crop-duster performing the tight turns and banking of his craft. The instant we recognized it the lights became the obvious tips of the aircrafts wings, nose, tail, and whatever else.
Still, it was like seeing the image switch from two vases into a face. We went from watching many distant objects to suddenly seeing one close-by object.
April 29th, 2008 at 1:32 am
I remember seeing a blimp lit-up at dusk once. It was positively eerie. At first it looked just like a little, soft-glowing disk way off near the horizon, almost like a little dim copy of the moon. It eventually made its way close to overhead (so I could see it really was only a blimp).
It may have been that experience that helped set me on the path to being a skeptic. It showed me how I could be easily fooled by something relatively mundane and that it is best to truly search for answers, not just leap to the coolest conclusion.
April 29th, 2008 at 2:48 am
I’ve once seen a UFO, too. It was a summer night and suddenly there was this thing flying across the sky and it was blinking in a very smooth way; it turned on and off in very precise time range…….
Well, we found out, that it just was a rotating satellite, and we were quite sure that wasn’t a UFO.
April 29th, 2008 at 6:16 am
Since it’s bright and we can barely discern a disk with the naked eye, Venus is easy to mistake for a terrestrial object. Fireballs can really light up the sky. I’ve only seen two, and one was so bright I would have mistook it for a crashing plane had I not realized it was a meteor. A weather balloon that crashed late one afternoon looked very odd. Back in the early 1970s there were these upper atmosphere experiments that left aurora-like color in the sky.
The only unidentified object I’ve witnessed was around the middle 1970s. An object with lights that hovered over one spot. What was interesting was that we were in contact on the CB with another observer. If we had thought about it, we could have triangulated the position and the altitude. While we cracked some jokes about aliens with eyes like fried eggs, we assumed it was some sort of military exercise involving a helicopter.
April 29th, 2008 at 6:40 am
“What bugs me are credulous news stations that report these things without talking to someone who actually knows anything about this!”
Phil, even when more serious media try to sollicit “knowledgeable”opinions, they usually end up at the wrong place. They then usually contact an astronomy department on some university or observatory and talk to a professional astronomer.
Now the point is: most professional astronomers themselves have very little true knowledge of things visible in the night sky, like meteors etcetera. They can tell you everything about Quasars, Neutron stars, black holes, B-type stars and Sb galaxies: but when it comes to things closer to home like meteors and other atmospheric phenomena they know very little. Problem is that quite often they nevertheless start to pronounce on it with some perceived authority.
I have a strong amateur background (to a semi-prof level, having actually published papers) in meteor related stuff. And I have seen too many times that some professional astronomer was saying things about meteor-related topics (and other night sky phenomena) that missed the truth completely and would squarely fit under “Bad Astronomy”
Given this, the media don’t have it easy. Even when they try. It’s a catch-22.
April 29th, 2008 at 7:32 am
If you want a real unexplained Texas mystery, try the Marfa Lights
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_light
April 29th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Do meteors ever appear to move very slowly? When I was a kid I saw a bright green light move slowly across the sky parallel with the ground, covered as much of the sky as I could see out my window. Course when I was a kid I knew for SURE it was aliens, which was awesome and fueled my imagination for months.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:08 am
jkeller:
That’s what the old timers called “Will O’ the Whisps.” How one interprets them depends on what one wants to see. It’s somewhat amusing to hear will o’ the whips described as “ghosts,” and it’s interesting to see what events people try to associate to them. OTOH, my grandmother grew up near a house noted will o’ the whips on the grounds, and they didn’t think it was anything other than some natural phenomenon.
April 29th, 2008 at 10:15 am
DPA:
That sounds like the green running light on an aircraft.
April 29th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Phil, you missed another round of “Arizona lights” while in Europe.
Didn’t miss much. Flares on balloons and the hoaxer was seen by a neighbor.
April 29th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
The Marfa lights sound somewhat similar to the Brown Mountain Lights of North Carolina. Both are unexplained phenomena, both are real events, and both seem to have fantastic theories to fill in the lack of facts.
Wikipedia didn’t really have much on this, but Ibiblio (from UNC) does:
http://www.ibiblio.org/ghosts/bmtn.html
April 29th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
It was big and yellow!
April 29th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
No, no, no Phil. There you go again oversimplifying like all the other skeptics.
You can’t post a picture of a blurry kite that someone mistook for an alien spaceship and say it’s proof that UFOs (alien spacecraft) don’t exist.
Just admit that you are afraid, and that the hundreds of thousands of sitings a year has reminded you that, as scientists, you made a mistake you are afraid to atone for.
April 29th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Oh, yeah, some of the comments above reminded me of another UFO sighting I had completely forgot.
It was when I was attending University, in a town 60 km away from home, which meant I often drove home for weekends. And usually did it friday night (quite often after midnight) to avoid traffic and skipping classes. That specific night the sky had some low clouds and some open spots, and about 10 minutes into the trip I started seing three colourful lights ahead of me, apparently dancing around the sky and then disappearing only to reappear a little later. I thought to myself “what the BEEP?!”, and went on driving, keeping an eye on the sky as I drove.
At some point I had to start looking into my rear view mirror to spot the lights, but kept puzzling about what that strange phenomenon might be almost till I got to town, although I stopped seing it some 10 minutes before that. I was alreading seing my hometown lights looming ahead when I recalled one crucial fact that provided an explanation for the thing.
That week, a disco about halfway between the town I was studying in and my hometown had innaugurated a new attraction: a set of projectors that were to be used as advertising for the place. I knew that because… well… I was in college. In college one always knows about stuff like that. They were just being reflected off the clouds, and were visible for miles in either direction. So it remained UFO for about half an hour. But had I not known about the disco, the phenomenon might have kept that condition for much longer.
(they were soon forced to turn the projectors down, BTW – the town I was studying in has an international airport, and they interfered with its operations, according to what I’ve heard)
April 29th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
What is even more annoying is when Australian newspapers and TV news directly convert Imperial units to Metric/SI in their stories, as if they believe people shouldn’t be allowed to speak Imperial, eg: “I reckon it was doing about 320 km/h” when the original report said “200 MPH”.