“[I'll note that there were some reports of UFO earlier in the day, but those look just like balloons as well, probably from a different event.]”

So you rail on Fox News (correctly) for jumping to conclusions without doing any research. Yet, you did the same thing here. Were there actually two events going on in NYC? Or could it have been something else? I’m in no way suggesting it was actual UFO’s, but “probably from a different event” is just as dangerous as what they did. Except you have less viewers.

You fail to note the distinction here. We already know that balloons exist.

BTW, that’s fewer viewers, not “less”. I thought that one had been sorted out back in 1970. Didn’t you see Apollo 13?

@ Quiet Desperation:

That would be the rare flying elephant wing aircraft.

Otherwise known as the Dumbo Jet.

Under the correct circumstances, apparently, there are people with exceptional visual acuity that CAN see the moons of Jupiter – but they have to hide the glare of the planet somehow. Me, I can’t see the moons without binoculars – and even then I have to have the binos on a tripod.

Because that would be really, really, really, really funny. Really.

Really.

He obviously has never looked at the sky personally, or he would know that the moons of Jupiter are not visible to the naked eye.

Huh???? Since when???? As others have already said, the Galilean satellites can be seen with any half-decent pair of binoculars, at least if they are mounted on a tripod. And as any amateur astronomer knows, they are easily visible through a 60 mm ( 2.4 inch ) refractor – even of the cheap, poor quality “department store” kind which most young kids interested in astronomy are given by their parents as their first telescope. Indeed, for most kids who begin with such a telescope, the second and third things they look at, after the Moon, are Jupiter with its satellites and Saturn. ( Yes, you can also see Saturn’s rings with such a telescope, in case you’re wondering. )
All four Galilean satellites are in fact bright enough to be visible, in theory, to the naked eye. The only reason they are not is because they are so close to the glare of Jupiter itself. And as already stated, some people have seen them with the naked eye, by occulting Jupiter.

…
Is it me or does this one have a proboscis?

It does! Of course while flying it tucks up neatly to cover the hole the landing gear makes in the fuselage.

jbs

That would be the rare flying elephant wing aircraft.

Popular UFO culture invariably takes its cues from other developments in engineering, science, and pop culture. In this case, the flying wings reborn as B2 bombers and F-117 stealth fighters almost immediately triggered the trend of identifying some “alien spacecraft” as “triangles.”

As is obvious to anyone who isn’t enmeshed in their own fantasies, the few sightings of these “unknown” craft during their early test flights, before their designs were officially made public, account for the beginnings of this trend. Of course, they quickly became part of a growing and increasingly rich (ahem!) mythology invented, voluntarily or not, to fill in the vacuum that existed in the absence of any real data.

We’ve seen this phenomenon occur over and over, from the “saucers” popular in Buck Rogers comics and other pulp fiction of the 1920s and 30s influencing early descriptions of UFO/spacecraft, to the shift in aliens from vaguely insectoid monsters to more humanoid little green men and now, the vaguely angelic “greys” and other make-believe phenotypes.

As is typical with UFO nuttery, I find these cultural influences much more interesting than the UFO myths themselves.

OR SO THEY SAY! HA! RUBE!

But the Air Force also was working on the flying wing at the same time , after crashes of several prototypes (due to instabity ) they gave up on the flying wing ,untill the late 1980s when the flying wing was revived as the B2 the instiably problem was solved thro advanced computer tec

I recall reading that most of the technical issues were solvable with the resources of the day. It was just that the flying wing didn’t offer any real advantage over more mainstream solutions to make the effort worth it.

It was a beautiful thing, though. It was always a favorite of mine as a kid after it showed up in a scene in War Of The Worlds. When they rolled out the B2 I remember exclaiming “The flying wing lives!’

Is it me or does this one have a proboscis?

Pete (99) said:

Moons of Jupiter?????? LOL…. the moons of Jupiter need a high power scope to view.

Rubbish!
I’ve seen one of them (probably Ganymede, but I don’t know that for sure) through a cheap (we’re talking the equivalent of about US$15 – 20 here) pair of binoculars. It would only take a marginally better pair of bins to see all four of the Galilean moons. While Io And Europa are smaller than Ganymede and Callisto, they are also brighter objects.

My 7×35 sport binoculars when tripod mounted work well for seeing all four Galilean moons. They weren’t very expensive (about $40 US). If I don’t use a tripod Jupiter and the quartet of moons seem to dance all over and I can’t really tell what I’m seeing (even though I already know).

@Gus:

Were you using the binoculars on a tripod? That helps tremendously. Also, the orbit’s of the moons mean the relative positions of them is always changing – maybe you got lucky and they all lined up behind or in front of the planet!

In case anyone wants to put their binoculars on their favorite camera tripod but can’t figure out how, any astronomy retailer (Optcorp, Celestron, Orion, B&H Photo, etc.) will carry tripod adapters for binoculars.
jbs

I tried to get a better look at Jupiter with binoculars, and I couldn’t see any moons. But I certainly wouldn’t say you couldn’t. I’ve got a lot of light pollution. I may try my camera lens next, I think it’s got better magnification than the binoculars. I guess Jupiter is the latest UFO sighting simply because it’s very visible right now and at a time that a lot of people are still out.

I think it’s fair to say the El Paso lights are now safely “IFOs”. They appeared at the same time as the military flights in which magnesium flares were dropped, in the same location as the flares, and behaved and appeared exactly like those flares. Three strikes, you’re in.

I think you could reread any of the BA’s old UFO posts and get the exact same comments, and probably in the same general order, too.

At lest noen added a slightly different spin, even if he ended up with the same conclusion as the usual UFO nutters.