I know a lot of the media do their best when it comes to reporting science and astronomical-related stories, but sometimes they seem to go way out of their way — or, more accurately, not go out of their way at all — to report nonsense.
Case in point: Fox News in New York City. Yesterday, there were UFO reports from all over the city. Not to keep you in suspense, but those UFOs were actually hundreds of balloons released on Broadway to celebrate a visit by Madrid officials. You can see more about this by my friend Ben Radford and at Science-Based Parenting.
Note that balloons explain everything: the UFOs were in clusters, they moved randomly, they were seen as dots, nothing was reported on radar, they floated for hours, they slowly disappeared, the timing was right. As far as explanations go, we’re done here. [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.]
Now, I can forgive the Fox reporter for not knowing about the balloons; cases like this do happen. However, watch the video of the reporter: she clearly didn’t do any investigation at all of this other than to talk to a few people in the street (if the YouTube video gets taken down, you can watch it on the Fox page, but at lower res):
