Recently, a man called the Hertfordshire (UK) police to report flashing lights in the sky… and, well, listen for yourself:

Heh. Well, I’m actually glad he called back to admit his mistake!

You might think this is really unusual, but this call doesn’t surprise me at all. Take a look at the links in the Related Posts section below; people have reported Jupiter and balloons as UFOs, and the Moon has made an appearance once or twice as well. Even dust motes on old photographic plates have spurred warnings of a menace from space…

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Nancy Atkinson.

I have received approximately an infinite number of emails about a video purporting to show a UFO hovering over the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The video went viral last week, with several others being released not long after. When I first saw it, I knew instantly it was a hoax. How? Watch for yourself.

It’s pretty cool, but an obvious hoax. Imagine you’re standing late at night videotaping the scene with a friend because it’s so pretty. Out of nowhere a bright light comes down out of the sky, hovers over one of the most famous temples on the planet, then flashes brilliantly and shoots straight up at fantastic speed.

Would you just stand there like a lump without showing any reaction at all, like the guy in the video?

Also, it seems a little weird that such an incredibly bright object could hang over this heavily visited site, even in the middle of the night, and there were no reports of any eyewitnesses. Just one video that turns up, and a few days later a couple more. Seriously?

And now this video has been conclusively shown to be faked. (more…)

Are there three giant spaceships on their way to Earth, dooming us to extinction when they arrive in — gasp! — December 2012?

Duh. No.

But you might think otherwise reading an article about this on The Examiner’s website. It documents the three spaceships, shows images, and even has quotes from a SETI astrophysicist!

SETI Astrophysicist Craig Kasnov (not to be confused with Craig Kasnoff ) has announced the approach to the Earth of 3 very large, very fast moving objects. The length of the "flying saucers" is in the range of tens of kilometers. Landing, according to calculations of scientists, should be in mid-December 2012. Date coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar.

There are some teeny, tiny, problems with this story, though. Like, the "spaceships" are actually image defects and aren’t real, there’s no way to figure out how big they from the picture, and the "astrophysicist" quoted in the article doesn’t even exist.

But gee, other than that…

1) The spaceship that wasn’t

It’s been a while since I’ve done a good ol’ smackdown debunking, so let’s take these one at a time. First things first: the spaceships. Shown here, as you can see, the article refers to a picture of a big blue wormy-thingy floating in space. What could it be? Well, because I don’t trust articles online talking about giant spaceships invading us (or anything anyone says about doomsday in 2012), I went to the original pictures themselves.

NASA has an image archive viewer called SkyView, which I used to use all the time when I worked on Hubble data. It has access to dozens of surveys of the sky taken using various telescopes, including the Second Digitized Sky Survey the UFO article mentions. Amazingly, the article gives coordinates for the "spaceships", so I took a look for myself. (more…)

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):

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Whenever I mention UFOs on the blog, I get a fair number of rabid comments calling me names, attacking me on small details while ignoring the big picture, and so on. Most of these come because of a simple statement I need to repeat often: astronomers report very few if any UFOs because for the most part, we understand what we’re seeing in the sky.

When we see a satellites, a glint off a distant airplane, birds, astronomical objects, lightning, or meteors, we can generally identify them and don’t need to call the police or the newspapers. The vast majority of people out there, however, are not familiar with the sky, and so when they see these things they can (understandably) freak out a little. That includes sightings of Venus and the Moon.

And now the king of the planets can join that list: via Fark comes the news that residents of Washington state have been calling the police to report a UFO low in the east after sunset. And that UFO has turned out to be none other than the planet Jupiter.

I’m not surprised. Jupiter is very bright and obvious in the sky right now. Since it’s getting dark earlier, people are outside when they’re not quite used to it being dark yet. And since Jupiter is rising at sunset, it’s low in the sky; people driving will see it through the window and think it’s following them. And it’s very, very common for people to think a bright object is actually a big object.

It’s a perfect confluence of events to promote UFO sightings. I should’ve seen it coming!

But there’s some good to come of this. For one, it means people are in fact going outside and looking up. That alone makes me happy. Also, these folks find out they’re looking at Jupiter, when maybe they didn’t even know they could see a planet at all (though I bet a few won’t believe the cops or papers). And the best part? The article about the Jupiter UFO reports gives some basic info about Jupiter, too. That’s great! Kudos to the Peninsula Daily News for taking this chance to get a little astronomical coolness out there to its readers.

Just thought y’all would like this video of the spiral over Australia caused by the Falcon 9 second stage booster. This really shows you the motion of the spin, as well as the bulk motion of the object across the sky; it moves just as you’d expect something in orbit to move. Shocking, I know.

Apparently, a lot of people saw it; Aussies must be early risers. Man, I’d love to see something like this. So cool.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to The Plane Talking blog.

Yesterday, a lot of Australians reported seeing a bizarre UFO.

Just before 6:00 a.m. local time, numerous reports came in about a spiral of light in the sky with a bright central spot. The light was actually spinning around, like a pinwheel! One site has pretty cool video of it, and pictures are turning up on the web as well.

Sound familiar? Yeah, it should: these reports are almost exactly like a spiral shaped light seen over Norway last year. The Norway sighting — a picture of it is below, on the right — was positively identified as a Russian missile, so of course as soon as I heard of this new Aussie sighting the first thing I thought of was that it was a rocket booster.

So I leaned over my keyboard and was about to Google "rocket launch schedule" or something similar, when I suddenly stopped. I smiled, leaned back, and almost literally facepalmed myself. Gee, I thought to myself, what rocket would’ve launched yesterday morning?

Duh: the SpaceX Falcon 9! The private company successfully held its first test launch of the big rocket, blasting off from its Florida pad at 18:45 UT Friday — which is 04:45 Sydney, Australia time.

I don’t have ground tracks yet (maps of the path of the rocket over the Earth’s surface) Here’s the Falcon 9 ground track — the path of the rocket over the Earth’s surface — provided by jetforme (based on orbital parameters):

Note how the path goes right over eastern Australia! The timing is perfect, too: about an hour later, the second stage would’ve been halfway around the world, matching the position and time of the UFO sightings.

The spiral pattern seen in Norway is known to be from gas leaking out of the booster. As the booster spins and the gas shoots out, it makes a water-sprinkler spiral pattern in the sky. As it happens, the second stage of the Falcon 9 was rotating; this was not supposed to happen and the SpaceX engineers are looking into it (it didn’t affect the launch adversely; the payload achieved orbit).

So the timing was right, the booster was spinning, and we know that spirals like this are an outcome of rocket launches.

Of course, this isn’t enough for some UFO believers. ABC in Australia had this from Doug Moffett of the UFO Research NSW:
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