From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <post.nul>
Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2009 06:12:47 -0500
Archived: Sun, 08 Feb 2009 06:12:47 -0500
Subject: Astronomical Causes Of UFOs




Source: Ian Ridpath.Com - Brentford, Middlesex, England, UK

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/astroufo1.htm

January 27, 2009


Astronomical Causes Of UFOs
Ian Ridpath

Surprising as it may seem, astronomical objects are the most
common cause of mistaken UFO reports, including close
encounters.

---

Approaching Manchester airport, England, on the evening of 1995
January 6, a British Airways Boeing 737 with 60 passengers on
board was buzzed by a bright, fast-moving UFO. The first officer
ducked instinctively as it flashed past. The conversation
between the pilot and Manchester air traffic control was as
follows:

Pilot: "We just had something go down the right hand side just
above us very fast"

Manchester: "Well, there's nothing seen on radar. Was it an
aircraft?"

Pilot: "Well, it had lights, it went down the starboard side
very quick"

Manchester: "And above you?"

Pilot: "Just slightly above us, yeah".

At the time of the incident, which occurred at 18.48 pm, the
Boeing was descending through 4,000 ft altitude about nine miles
southeast of Manchester. Visibility was over 10 km, it was dark
and the Boeing was flying in clear air above cumulus cloud on a
northerly heading. The UFO was moving in the opposite direction
and was visible for about two seconds. There was no apparent
sound or wake. No other pilots reported it, nor was it seen from
the ground, presumably because of the intervening cloud.

The incident was considered so unusual that the pilots submitted
a report which was investigated by the Civil Aviation
Authority's (CAA) Independent Joint Airmiss Working Group. Their
findings were published in February 1996.

In his report to the CAA the pilot described the object as
having a number of small white lights, like a Christmas tree.
While he was convinced that the object itself was lit, the co-
pilot differed, describing it as a dark wedge-shaped object with
what could have been a black stripe down the side, and thought
that it was illuminated by the Boeing 737's landing lights. (In
fact this is unlikely, since the object was above and to the
side of the Boeing). The co-pilot was convinced that it was not
a meteorological phenomenon, balloon, or any other craft they
were familiar with, including a Stealth aircraft.

In its investigation the CAA considered the possibility that the
UFO could have been another aircraft ranging from a hang glider
or microlight to a military flight, but found no evidence to
support such suggestions. The CAA investigators did not consider
other possible causes since they were outside their remit of air
safety, but remarked that "almost all unusual sightings can be
attributed to a wide range of well-known natural phenomena".
They concluded that the incident "remains unresolved".

Had the CAA chosen to consider astronomical explanations, a
likely answer would not have been difficult to find. From the
captain's description, the object sounds like a bright fireball,
and in view of the lack of a radar return or a wake there is no
good reason to suppose that it was anything else. Such a
misidentification by experienced pilots is not unusual, as we
shall see from what follows. In fact, another British Airways
pilot and two RAF Tornado pilots had described a satellite re-
entry in similar terms in 1990 (for details, see here and here).
But, in the annals of UFOlogy, the Manchester case has gone down
as a UFO officially endorsed by the Civil Aviation Authority.

---

Amateur astronomers know more about the causes of UFO sightings
than most so-called UFO researchers. Arthur C. Clarke, not a man
with a closed mind, once said: "If you've never seen a UFO,
you're not very observant. And if you've seen as many as I have,
you won't believe in them."

To see what he meant, we need to look at some statistics.
Astronomical objects are by far the main causes of mistaken UFO
reports. In a classic analysis of 1,300 UFO reports made to the
Center for UFO Studies in the US, published by Allan Hendry in
The UFO Handbook (Sphere, 1980), just over half of all
identified nocturnal lights were accounted for by astronomical
causes: stars, planets, meteors, the Moon, artificial
satellites, and satellite re-entries.

What's more, astronomical objects also featured prominently
among the identified daytime UFOs, those involving apparent
corroboration by radar, and the various classes of close
encounters, including the celebrated Third Kind in which
occupants are supposedly sighted. In short, an astronomical
solution should always be uppermost in a UFO investigator's
mind, but experience shows that few UFOlogists have even a
rudimentary understanding of astronomy and so fail to weed out
even easily explicable cases.

Why should simple lights in the sky cause such confusion? As
amateur astronomers know, most people are totally unfamiliar
with the sky. Highly credible witnesses such as teachers,
policemen and pilots (yes, and astronomers) can still be
surprised by the unexpected appearance of a bright star, planet,
meteor, or satellite.

Usually, a description such as "it seemed to hover for an hour"
is diagnostic of a star or planet (people get fed up watching
after about an hour, or the object sets). Often there are other
descriptions such as "flashing coloured lights" or "it appeared
to be rotating" which is how bright stars appear when they are
twinkling, notably Sirius on a cold, frosty night. Binoculars do
not always help identification if they happen to be cheap and
with optical defects that produce spurious colours and shapes.

Additional information such as "it wasn't there before" or "it
appeared to move slowly" or "it dodged around" are still
consistent with characteristics of stars and planets. Many
people don't realize that stars rise and set during the night.
Thin clouds can make stars appear to dim and brighten, as though
they were receding or approaching. And, when seen between
scudding clouds, stars really do appear to dodge around.

A more subtle effect is known technically as the autokinetic
effect. In this, natural movements of the eye make a stationary
object appear to move irregularly, sometimes zooming up and down
or swinging from side to side in a movement sometimes described
as like a "falling leaf". Autokinetic motion can be uncanny when
watching artificial satellites, which often appear to zig zag or
even make deviations around stars in their path.

Another shortcoming of human perception is that it is impossible
to judge the distances of lights in the sky. A planet millions
of miles away, an aircraft several thousand feet away, or a
torch bulb a few dozen yards away all appear much the same size
and brightness at night. The examples in this article show the
tendency of witnesses to grossly underestimate the distance of
nocturnal lights.

Let's start by looking at some instructive examples involving
the planet Venus, the biggest UFO culprit of all, popularly
known as the "evening star" (although it can also appear in the
morning sky as the "morning star"). As amateur astronomers know,
Venus is the brightest object in the night sky after the Moon
and can dazzle the eye, sometimes appearing cross-shaped. Back
in 1967, there was a famous case in which two policemen in
Devon, England, reported Venus as a UFO shaped like a "flying
cross" and chased it in their car at speeds up to 90 mile/h.

Perhaps the most celebrated UFO witness of all time was the
governor of the US state of Georgia, a former American naval
officer trained in celestial navigation and nuclear physics, who
was later to become president of the United States: Jimmy
Carter. In 1973, Carter reported that four years earlier he and
10 other people in the town of Leary, Georgia, had watched a
brilliant UFO low on the horizon which appeared to move towards
them and away again, while changing in brightness, size, and
colour. He estimated the distance as between 300 ft and 1,000
ft, and said that at times it became almost as big and bright as
the full Moon.

This case was thoroughly investigated by Robert Sheaffer, who
described it in his book The UFO Verdict (Prometheus, 1981). For
a start, Sheaffer found that Carter was nine months out in his
recollection of the date. Of the ten claimed witnesses, Sheaffer
could find only one who remembered the incident even vaguely,
and he thought the object might have been a balloon. But with
the correct date established, Sheaffer found that the witnesses
had been looking straight at brilliant Venus. The errors in his
report are typical of those made by UFO witnesses: the size and
brightness of the object is overestimated, the distance is
underestimated, and spurious motion is attributed to the object.

In The UFO Handbook, Allan Hendry describes an apparent close
encounter of the third kind stimulated by Venus. A woman
reported that a very bright object in the southwest had made a
slow, jerky descent over a period of an hour one evening. As she
stared at it, she became convinced that she could see occupants
with rounded silvery heads looking out of the object's windows.
The UFO turned up again on subsequent nights, exactly where
Venus should be.

Keep this report of apparent occupants in mind when considering
the famous story of an American couple, Betty and Barney Hill,
who claimed to have been chased by a UFO one night. Barney
stopped to look at the object through binoculars and reported
seeing a row of windows with alien faces peering out. Thinking
they were going to be abducted, the Hills drove off in panic.
Later, Betty Hill dreamed that they really were abducted, and
many UFOlogists have believed her dream story.

Yet, from Betty Hill's own sketch, Robert Sheaffer has
identified the UFO as Jupiter, which is second only to Venus in
brightness. The apparent 'chasing' is another phenomenon of
celestial objects, which appear to keep pace with moving cars.
Sheaffer also describes a hilarious 100 mph police chase of
Venus through Ohio and Pennsylvania in 1966. They never did
catch it, but they did inspire a scene in the movie Close
Encounters of the Third Kind.

Another example of a 'close encounter' with Venus concerns a
Spanish family driving home one evening, known as the Serena
encounter after the family involved. They reported that they
were chased by a bright light which descended to a height of 7
to 8 metres above their car, lowered landing gear and caused one
of their children to be violently sick. Venus at that time was a
brilliant object in the evening sky but the investigators of
this case, who included an American professor of physics, Willy
Smith, rejected Venus as an explanation because its setting time
was around 9.30 pm GMT, whereas the UFO was visible until 10.30
pm.

However, the investigators forgot that Spain keeps one hour
ahead of GMT and so the visibility of the UFO matched that of
Venus exactly. The child's stomach upset is easily explained by
a combination of fear and travel sickness on the winding road.
Hence even a close encounter endorsed by a professor of physics
can have a simple astronomical explanation.

In recent years, I have seen a number of videos taken with hand-
held camcorders which appear to show saucer-shaped objects
making erratic motions in the evening sky. These videos are
clearly of Venus in twilight. The "movement", noticeable only
when the camera is zoomed in, is due simply to tremors in the
hands of the excited camera operator, while the apparent shapes
of the objects are optical effects in the camera itself.
Parenthetically, video evidence has also made it clear that many
daytime UFOs are now caused by small, shiny helium-filled
balloons of the type given out at fairgrounds. In addition, a
type of rotating reflective kite called the UFO SAM has made its
own contribution to sightings. More recently, small decorative
hot air balloons called Sky Lanterns or UFO Balloons have joined
the list of culprits, generating reports of orange-coloured
"saucer fleets". (For more about fire balloon misidentifications
and pranks, see here and here). Another addition to the list,
brought to my attention by someone who was temporarily fooled by
one at night, are kites and balloons designed to scare birds.
Even black plastic bags, when heated by the Sun, can become UFO-
like balloons.

Getting back to astronomy, it is understandable that people can
misidentify planets and bright stars - but surely not the Moon?
Yet it happens. Allan Hendry describes a case in which three
witnesses observed a saucer "25 ft in diameter" accompanied by
two pulsating lights which hovered over a car park for nearly an
hour, dimming the car park lights as though draining power from
them. A humming noise was heard which changed to a loud beeping
before the saucer shot straight up into the sky. A parakeet
owned by one of the witnesses screeched and her dogs barked. The
woman felt as though she was in a trance and could hardly move.

This has all the hallmarks of a classic UFO case:
electromagnetic effects, animal reactions, and physical effects
on the witnesses. However, Hendry determined that the witnesses
were looking at the crescent Moon (the "saucer") with Mars and
Jupiter next to it (the "pulsating lights"). The dimming of the
car park lights was caused by intermittent mist which eventually
obscured the Moon and planets. The rest of the report is a
marvellous product of human imagination.

Meteors (bits of dust and rock from space burning up in the
atmosphere to produce a briliant streak of light) are less easy
to identify after the event because of their transient nature.
Humans are as bad at estimating time as they are at estimating
brightness and distance, and reports often exaggerate the
duration for which a meteor was seen. Very bright meteors - say,
brighter than the planet Venus - are termed fireballs. These are
so bright they can be caught on normal video cameras, and a
fascinating selection of sightings can be found on this page -
particularly impressive is the Perth fireball of 2005, filmed by
chance during a family party at a house in Western Australia,
which generated widespread reports of an aircraft crash [2.5 MB
AVI file]. Also try this one seen more recently (2009) in
Sweden.

Even people familiar with normal meteors can be fooled by
unusually bright fireballs. Here is an example quoted by Philip
Klass in his book UFOs Explained (Random House, 1974). Pilots
aboard a commercial jet flying at 39,000 ft over the United
States in 1969 were reportedly buzzed in daylight at a distance
of 300 ft by a formation of four objects emitting a blue-green
flame. A military jet flying some miles behind the airliner
reported a squadron of UFOs approaching that suddenly started to
climb as if to avoid a collision.

At the same time as this UFO "encounter", a brilliant daylight
fireball broke up into several flaming pieces over the United
States, and there seems little doubt that this is what the
pilots saw, despite the fact that it was actually over 100 miles
away from, them. So even experienced pilots can make major
errors of identification and distance. That doesn't make them
bad airmen, simply human. The encounter near Manchester reported
at the start of this article seems to have been a more modest
example of the same thing. For an example of how a brilliant
fireball and bright stars featured in a multi-witness sighting
involving the US Air Force, see my investigation of the
celebrated Rendlesham Forest UFO case.

Even sightings involving military radar are no more likely to
involve "genuine" UFOs. In 1989 a series of reports began to
emanate from Belgium, culminating on the night of 1990 March
30-31 with widespread sightings by police and an aerial "chase"
by Belgian Air Force F-16 fighters involving radar contact with
an unidentified target. This now-famous event turned out to have
been sparked off by misidentifications of bright stars and
planets while the radar returns were due to atmospheric effects
and equipment malfunction. Faced with cases such as this and
Rendlesham, both still declared unexplained by some UFOlogists,
one wonders how far it is possible to credit any UFO report.

Over half a century after the launch of Sputnik 1, many people
are still surprised to find that orbiting satellites can be seen
from the ground with the naked eye. Satellites have tricks that
can fool even experienced observers. Some satellites flash as
they rotate; others travel in convoys, including triangular
formations; and others fade and disappear as they enter the
Earth's shadow, giving an effect that is sometimes described as
"vanishing rapidly upwards".

A new breed of UFO culprits is a series of satellites launched
to relay signals for the Iridium mobile phone system. There are
over 70 of these, launched since May 1997, and they have highly
reflective aluminium antennae which can catch the Sun, giving
sudden spectacular glints far brighter than any star or planet,
lasting for a few seconds. Such sudden brightening followed by
fading may give the impression of something rapidly approaching
and then receding.

I have mentioned the zig-zagging of satellites due to effects in
the eye. In his collection of essays The View from Serendip
(Gollancz, 1978), Arthur C. Clarke described an unexpected
sighting of the balloon satellite Echo which appeared to stop
and hover overhead before resuming its onward path. The reasons,
as he realized afterwards, were that he and film producer
Stanley Kubrick, who was also watching, were too excited to
observe calmly; it is almost impossible to assess the motion of
something overhead; and moonlight had swamped the background
stars against which the motion could be judged.

Echo, a particularly brilliant satellite, re-entered long ago,
but many other bright satellites have taken its place, notably
the International Space Station. If real alien spacecraft were
whizzing around in orbit they would rapidly be noticed both by
amateur satellite spotters and by defence radars which are
actually designed to look for spaceships - our own.

Finally, satellite re-entries occur on a daily basis. In
appearance they are similar to fireballs but can be brighter,
longer-lasting, and slower-moving. As a man-made object burns up
it usually fragments into numerous pieces, giving the impression
of a cigar-shaped UFO with portholes.

For instance, a widely reported sighting over the British Isles
early on 1993 March 31 termed the Cosford Incident is now known
to have been caused by the re-entry of the rocket that launched
the Russian Cosmos 2238 satellite into orbit, combined with the
misidentification of a police helicopter by a meteorologist at
an RAF base an hour and a half later. Yet the MoD investigator
at the time, Nick Pope, declared: "It seems that an unidentified
object of unknown origin was operating in the UK Air Defence
Region without being detected on radar." Hence another solved
case has come to be regarded by some as an officially recognized
UFO.

Satellite predictions, including flashes from Iridium
satellites, can be obtained for any location in the world from
the web site hosted by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) on
http://www.heavens-above.com

Good UFO spotting!

---

http://www.ianridpath.com/cv/cv.htm
ian.nul


[Thanks to 'The Norm' for the lead]



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