Let me start by saying that I do not know what most people of north central Texas saw and reported as a UFO last week. If the published reports are accurate — then what they saw was very unusual at least, and if true, then we cannot rule out an extraterrestrial origin. However, I must emphasize that it is very big if.
In the image to the left, the large bright blob to the right is the overexposed image of the sun, whereas the smaller, conical blob to the left is a sundog.
Based on what I have heard in reports, no normal natural or manmade object would move in the way described. However, of the photographic “evidence” presented so far … let’s just say that I have my doubts. One video on CNN shows a dot in the sky, which in several frames appears to show a flashing light highly indicative of an aircraft of human origin. However, this is a low-quality cell phone image, and certainly subject to some interpretation. I do not think that anything definitive can be said, and as such skepticism should rule.
What really bugs me, however, is a photo published by the Fort Worth Star Telegram a couple of days ago. Now, truth be told, I consider Fort Worth my adopted home town, and the Star Telegram (which I used to refer to, years ago, as the “Startle-gram”) is the hometown newspaper. For years it was the home paper of a favorite of mine, Molly Ivins.
However, the Star Telegram has hit a new low with the publication of a photo by a Kentucky truck driver, of what he called a “curious object” in the sky near Cisco (Eastland county, near Erath county where the majority of reports came). Now the trucker’s description of this as a “curious object” is not unreasonable. Although the object in the photo is neither alien nor greatly unusual, it is unfamiliar to many people. The photo very clearly shows what is known as a “sundog” or “mock sun,” a multi-colored image resulting from sunlight reflecting off ice crystals high in the atmosphere. Granted, this is not seen every day, but it is completely natural and well known. It is hardly unusual and certainly not alien. Given this, the further description given by the Kentucky truck driver is at best a major embellishment and, perhaps due to the excitement of the moment, a serious if not necessarily intentional fabrication.
Sundogs, which this unquestionably is, do not move or act in the manner the Kentucky truck driver described. I can’t say that he was drunk, but I would not be far off by saying the he was perhaps “absolutely chock clean through with wild blueberry muffins.” No sundog acts as described, and frankly this is this kind of garbage that gives a black eye to every legitimate claim of anything unusual in the sky. Instead of ranting and raving at me (which some UFO fanatics undoubtedly will do), those who believe in an honest investigation should spend time working to educate the media, whose mandate appears to present anything sensational, without any concern for reality or truth.
Now, again, I do not know what everyone who reported a UFO in the Stephenville area last week saw. But it is abundantly clear that at least some of the folks who were successful in getting media attention absolutely do not know what they are talking about. There are legitimate UFO researchers who believe that there is reason to investigate some UFO reports, and that they may conceivably be explained by extraterrestrial visits to Earth. I do not deny this as a possibility and I do agree that reasonable research needs to go forward. But I also feel that everyone needs to act logically, assess reasonably, and to rely on the concepts of science rather than emotion.
You can claim anything you want to if you don’t have any evidence that can be examined. There may turn out to be something to the Stephenville UFO reports. But until there is good evidence, it’s best not to make wild claims.
It’s good to see that at least one person understands the definition of UFO: Unidentified Flying Object, NOT Alien Spacecraft. I’ve enjoyed reading the handful of UFO articles you’ve written and am always glad to see that you take the time to go through the possible explanations before declaring it an alien spacecraft. I enjoy hearing about possible explanations that I’ve never heard of and that after hearing about them make a lot of sense when compared to pictures and eye-witness accounts. Thanks for the article.
Zephyrus,
I think my point is that it is best not to jump to conclusions. It seems that a lot of people see something for the first time, or something that they otherwise can’t immediately explain, and jump to the conclusion that it is something abnormal or even paranormal. I think that we are all best served by assuming that things have ordinary explanations. Then if it is important enough, we can examine it further. If after thorough examination, none of the “ordinary” explanations work, then you can get excited about it. But if you jump into something and start making extraordinary claims for it without any good evidence, you stand the chance to end up looking like an idiot.
A lot of people jump to bizarre conclusions because they want them to be true. Maybe they just need more excitement in their lives, who knows? I also want UFO reports to be real sightings of aliens — that would make life much more interesting! But I want to believe in things that are true, not make-believe. I hold out the possibility that some UFO sighting, someday, may be the genuine article, but I see absolutely no proof of any of it yet. And frankly, while some observers may be seeing something truly unusual (although not necessarily alien), a lot of others are just making up stories.
Larry S.
It was interesting that some witnesses reported a huge object about a mile long. The object spotted by hundreds in the “Phoenix lights” case was also reported to be this size. For some context and history, check out the article: “Researchers, others visit Stephenville to gather information, insight about UFO sightings” (AmericanChronicle.com, January 16, 2008) at …
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/49385
I submit that perception of size is very subjective if you have no real data. Soemthing small looks large if it is close and something large looks small if it is far away. It bugs me for someone to claim something up in the sky, with which there is nothing for them to compare, is “a mile wide,” or “the size of a football field,” which are things I have heard in the past. How do they know? Without a good idea of distance, there simply is no way for them to know. So size perception of objects in the sky is very subjective.
The reports talk of how reliable the observers are. Well, some may be, and some not. You might expect that a professional astronomer would be an excellent observer and would never be fooled by things in the sky, but read this from astronomer Alan W. Hirshfeld in his book, “Parallax”:
“When it comes to distance perception, even an experienced observer can be fooled. This was driven home to me a few years ago while I was cruising along the interstate. I saw what looked like an enormous hot-air balloon off in the distance. The balloon was so far away that I couldn’t even make out the passenger basket I believed to be suspended below it. The huge sphere looked positively serene, floating lazily in the sky, and I imagined what it would be like to see the world from up there. But as I approached the balloon, I could tell that something was wrong. My visual sensations of the balloon didn’t seem right. The balloon was rapidly picking up speed as though an invisible hand were accelerating it sideways. Soon it appeared to be moving impossibly fast across the sky. What in the world was going on? Then, in an instant, my perception of the scene changed dramatically. This was no giant, passenger-carrying balloon I was looking at; it was a room-sized advertising balloon. And there, as I drove past, was the rope tethering it to the ground. The balloon’s perceived size, distance and motion were an optical illusion, a complete fiction impressed upon it by my own brain.”
Claims such as something being a mile wide need substantiating evidence or they cannot be considered seriously.
LS
Larry,
How the Sam Hill can you be so sure this photograph, which you saw in a newspaper, is a “sundog”???
If the thing behaved as the witness said, then it definitely ISN’T a “sundog.” The only way it could be a “sundog” is, if the witness was plain wrong.
I am so tired of armchair “skeptics” or “journalists” like you who haven’t done a [**expletive deleted **] bit of investigating. Did you interview the witness? Is there some reason to disbelieve him? You are saying the guy is either lying, crazy, drunk, stupid or just plain wrong about what he saw. Otherwise, the object CAN’T be a “sundog.”
So you are basically calling the witness a liar.
OK, Harry, let me first say that I don’t allow profanity on my blog or in the comments. It is unnecessry and rude.
Secondly, I can’t claim to be the world’s greatest expert, but I do know what a sundog looks like. No, I didn’t personally investigate this incident. It wasn’t necessary. A sundog is a sundog, and nothing mysterious. You don’t see them every day, and many people have never seen one, but they still are completely natural and normal.
I don’t feel compelled to list my qualifications to you, but I have been observing the sky in one form or another for more than 50 years, and as a professional astronomy educator since the early 1970s, during which for several years I was a part-time field investigator for Dr. J. Allen Hynek and the Center for UFO Studies.
Imagine for a minute that you know something about cars. Maybe you’ve never owned one or even driven one, but let’s say that someone hands you photos of an old Lincoln Continental, a Chevy S10 Blazer and a Volkswagen Beetle. My guess is that you would be able to say conclusively which was the Beetle. Now it is true, if unlikely, that some customizer could have done a job transforming the Lincoln into a Beetle lookalike. But nature doesn’t work that way, and I personally doubt that any aliens would, either.
I have interviewed enough people who claim to have seen UFOs to know that people can get confused about what they saw. They can embellish, exaggerate and combine aspects of what they saw in an unreasonable fashion. I can’t say what the exact circumstances are that lead to this, or the motivations, so I would not presume to tell you what this Kentucky truck driver was thinking. But I can tell you that the photo is of a sundog or mock sun, also known as a parhelion (There is a better one here: Sundogs )
LS
I’m an illustrator, CGI and Graphics expert with 30 years experience, and I am a photographer and amateur astronomer. I photograph Sundogs, have science books on the subject and can tell you that whomever used this as even a possibility for the visual sightings I’ve read through Mufon reports is unqualified and uneducated to speak on this.
I can show you photos, diagrams and the actual science since my first exposures 1976 of Sundogs.
Whomever printed such grossly inaccurate theory should also be cited as unprofessional and ignorant of science and our current (last 50 years) understanding.
I am also a MUFON member and soon an investigator. Someone needs to offset the proliferation of idiots commenting on what they have no background to expound on.
Thanks for the article and a chance to contribute.
GMM
I am curious why a flashing light on an object rules out extraterrestrial origins.
I agree with you regarding the sundog in the photo, the witness describe mulitple lights on the object and that wouldn’t support a “sundog” as an explanation. Even more interesting is that for witnesses to see a sundog they would need to all be in relatively the same place looking in the same direction so if we had witnesses watching the object transit from West to East at a very low level again, sundogs would not be adequate to describe the phenomenon in question. I have seen sundogs and they are interesting but are always imbedded in a layer of clouds or water vapor and are seen at the altitude of the clouds themselves. This UAP for lack of a better description was described at ground level by a pilot, amongst others, who would be expected to know a sundog from a low altitude object…
While I think speculation is a start, I don’t think that doing it in public is a good idea because it simply fuels confusion.
I recall when the 2004 Mexico FLIR case was raging through the media we saw dozens of scientists who, with only a short clip and no supporting data, were heard to declare that the lights in question were falling space junk, meteors, plasmas, other aircraft… anything but aliens. And when the work to resolve the case was actually undertaken it was revealed that the source of the observations were oil well flares in the Gulf. To this day the case is pushed around as a legitimate UFO event when it was no such thing. The lesson there was that scientists are the same as UFO nuts, they operate from a belief rather than from an objective perspective.
The media carry much of the blame for this because it is a story and they HAVW to tell it. Reporters are notoriously ignorant. I deal with them all the time and they rarely have the qualifications to report to the world on most topics. A 1.5 minute soundbyte is not adequate for most stories and the media just really don’t care about truth or accuracy unless they are legally acountable. I have watched the media blow it over and over again, particularly with UFO cases…
Ted,
First off, thank you and everyone else who makes civil comment. You may not agree with me on all points, but I greatly appreciate it when someone disagrees without profane language and without resorting to personal attacks on me. Unfortunately, others at times have not been not so civilized, and I hope they get the point that I will not post such comments.
Regarding the question of why a flashing light rules out extraterrestrial origins — well, I never said that it rules it out. But I did want to indicate that a flashing light could result from a far more likely and familiar explanation.
I may be misreading this, but it seems to me that you think that I am saying that all or most of the sightings in Stephenville were of the sundog. I did not say that and I certainly did not mean to imply it. This was something like 50 miles from Stephenville, and it is quite possible that the sundog was not even visible there. In fact I wrote that I did not know what most people saw. My whole point was not to say that people did not see anything (or anything other than the sundog). My argument was basically with the media in pushing this particular sighting out there without any apparent critical thinking, and as far as I can tell, no attempt to consider any mundane explanation. The other sightings at this point to me are UFOs or UAPs or whatever we choose to call them, because we (or at least I) don’t know what people saw. As such we cannot conclusively rule out anything.
Correct me if I am wrong, but you also seem to be saying that the identification of the object as a sundog is speculation (although you agree with me that it was a sundog). I may be misreading what you are saying here, but there really is no reasonable question about it. Sundogs are well-known atmospheric phenomena, at least to meteorologists. Members of the general public may never have noticed them before, and may not know what they are, but that doesn’t mean that they are alien or abnormal in any way. I have not examined the original photo, but if you look carefully at the photo from the Star Telegram, and perhaps adjust the contrast a bit to bring out the detail, you can see a small bit of the 22-degree circumsolar halo that usually accompanies parhelia (sometimes it isn’t see because it is so faint against the bright background of the sky).
Now I do not know why the truck driver described what he saw the way he did. In fact, when I go back to the original article on the Star Telegram, I frankly don’t understand exactly what he was trying to say in parts of it. But much of what he said does not apply to sundogs, yet it was applied to his photo, which as I said before is unquestionably a sundog. Anyone is welcome to disagree with that assessment, but my feeling is that if it walks like a duck…. well, you know the rest. In the absence of evidence other than a verbal description, I will stick with the simple and (to me at least) obvious explanation. The real question to me is why his story is so far from what a sundog is really like.
Certainly I will agree with you that many reporters are completely ignorant of basic science, and seem to care nothing about truth and accuracy — just in getting the “scoop” or whatever it is called today. [Boy that could get me into hot water with some of the media types I know, but they all know it is true!] There are some highly competent, thoughtful and knowledgeable reporters and other media people, but the truth is, most are more interested in sensationalism than sense.
No one — no matter how fanatical, or how big a “believer” — would be as thrilled as I to come across some genuine evidence for an extraterrestrial intelligence, and even more if UFO reports were shown to be true testament to that. I *want* to believe it, but I don’t want that belief based on wishful thinking.
Everyone operates from a belief system, which is why I think we all need a solid foundation in rational thinking. Sadly, this apparently is no longer taught in schools or anywhere else. I don’t know who first said it, although I heard it first from Robin Williams, and have quoted it many times:
“Be open minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
LS
Hi, Garret. Thanks for the posting. Do you have any photos online we could reference?
LS
Fine . Don’t post it. Just think about it. Regards.
I just think people are way way too quick to jump to conclusions about some things. Of all the explanations for a flying object, many people seem to jump right to the least likely, namely an alien spacecraft. why is it that if they cannot explain it immediately it MUST be an alien? I have to agree with Larry that if the photo of the object in question looks like a sundog, then it probably is. I would not be surprised at all if a sundog could flash and twinkle a bit as one was driving down the road. I don’t know much about sundogs, but it appears that it’s partly sunlight reflecting off clouds (correct me if I’m wrong), so why couldn’t it flash a bit? just because the witness says it “had lights” on it, doesn’t mean they were detailed, electronic, man-made type lights. we have absolutely zero evidence that aliens exist, yet they’re almost always the first explanation given for an unidentified flying object. when one of these so called spacecraft actually lands and does something other than buzzing a small patch of civilization, then it will be easier to believe that aliens might visit earth.
Zephyrus,
Sundogs (also called “mock suns” or “parhelia”) happen when sunlight refracts off certain types of ice crystals high in the atmosphere. The conditions have to be just right, so you don’t seem them every day, but they certainly aren’t all that rare. I’ve seen lots of them over the years, and while sometimes they are all white, usually they have a rainbow like appearance. I have never seen one flash, but depending on the nature of the atmospheric layer where the crystals are, some colors may be more prominent than others, and of course this can change as viewed from different locations. Often there are two sundogs, level with the Sun and on either side of the Sun at about 22 degrees apart. Again depending on the ice crystals, sometimes there might be only one, and it is possible that one may fade and the other, on the other side of the Sun, might become visible. This certainly could not be construed as “flashing” (at least not in my experience), but it could seem odd (although it isn’t once you understand the process).
People want to believe in aliens. As I have said before, so do I. But I want my belief based on solid facts, not just desires.
LS
Too often when an UFO is reported many who are prone to believe we have been visted by aliens from far-away worlds, will immediately think the UFO an alien craft. Why can’t every reader think U=unidentified F= flying O= object . Period. Then seek someone, if you are not savvy, who has some scientific expertise and try to determine just what this object could be. I think too many news people wanting to sell newspapers and/or get their name associated with a “hot” topic will “juice-up” a report which is basically something which has a fairly common worldly explaination.
What would make a good witness to a UFO? Why would it matter who saw it for us to take it seriously? I understand that people lie but usually they lie to get out of trouble not to get into it. I also understand that most people aren’t experts so they could easily misinterpret something mundane. But isn’t it the job of the interviewer or investigator or the expert to determine what they saw. If people are seeing thinks that they can not readily identify why isn’t the US government investigating.
Antonio,
People have a near infinite capacity to misinterpret, exaggerate, imagine and even lie about things for any number of reasons that often seen completely ridiculous to everyone else. Some people simply want the attention, although my opinion is that most observers are not seeking attention or deliberately lying.
To an extent, *no one* is a completely reliable witness. I don’t think that the majority of people who report UFOs are lying, but I know from long experience that many completely sane and honest people frequently misinterpret what they see. It doesn’t matter if they are police officers, politicians or ministers. As such, scientists choose not to rely on eye-witness accounts only.
I’ve interviewed enough people to know that they generally get defensive, even belligerent if you tell them that you think what they saw was lights from an airplane, a weather balloon or whatever. Basically people don’t want the truth if it contradicts what they want to believe. So eye-witness testimony is just not good evidence. In a court of law, if all you have is eye-witness, a judge or jury might be forced to make a ruling. But in science — at least in good science — that just isn’t enough. You need evidence that is not easily explainable in any other way.
Let’s say that someone who is considered a reliable observer, or even a group of people, reported a strange light in the sky that suddenly appeared and then slowly began to sink toward the ground, finally to disappear. They saw no flashing lights and in the direction they were looking is wilderness with no airports for hundreds of miles. Being at night with no ground illumination to show it, it could not likely have been a weather balloon. The light did not move like a star or satellite, was too slow to be a meteor, and it was not in the place any planet or comet could be seen. What could you say? In this case I don’t think you could say anything about what it was, but rather what it appears not to be. If the observers are deemed reliable, then I think in this case the observation should remain classified as a UFO, since it remains unidentified and there is no reasonable known explanation. Now, please understand that this does not rule out natural phenomena or as yet undiscovered human activity in the direction of the light, and it certainly does not prove that the light was from an alien spacecraft from another world. But in this situation the sighting would remain unsolved.
Now, let’s say that the same report comes in, and it is not a planet, meteor, comet, satellite, “swamp gas” or a weather balloon. But, you happen to know that there is a major airport just a few miles away in the direction of the light, and it is such that you are lined up directly with the busiest runway. So you ask the observer if they are familiar with what planes landing at the airport look like and if they have ever seen a plane’s landing lights. They say of course they know what planes and landing lights are like and that this is certainly not an airplane.
This latter is a true example of a case I once investigated. I asked for them to call me if it ever appeared again, and within a week they called me and said it’s happening again. Being fairly close by, I rushed over the to observer’s location to find what seemed to be the entire neighborhood standing in the street — the one lined up with the runway — absolutely enraptured with airplanes coming to land on their regular schedules. There is no question that these people — no doubt all honest — we observing airplanes coming in to land at night, and they all thought they were UFOs. Now, would you waste time investigating this any further without good, physical evidence that what these people were seeing was anything other than landing airplanes? It would simply make no sense.
That of course is just one example, but if serious researchers spent time to investigate in detail every such report, nothing useful would ever get done.
So, eyewitness accounts cannot be considered good evidence. And if circumstances offer a good explanation and there is no physical evidence to the contrary, further study of such a sighting would be a waste of time, money and effort.
As to your last question, the government *DID* investigate UFOs extensively for years, and long ago concluded that there was no evidence worth pursuing any further. Conspiracy theorists likely will pop out of the woodwork right now and offer any number of ideas of why the government is “covering this up,” but I see no evidence of that. The government does cover things up, and the government does lie to us, and hides things from us, but there is simply no reason for them to cover this up, except to cover their own incompetence. You have right to doubt the government and not trust it, but there is no good reason whatsoever to believe that they have evidence of alien visitations to Earth, despite the claims of UFO devotees.
Larry S.
I don’t think we can apply the scientific method to an event that rarely happens. Science is too strict which is a good thing obviously. But if we will always need proof before investigating farther with UFOs then unless one crashed at the fifty yard line during the super bowl then this mystery will go on for ever.
I do think that the UFO community claims are a bit fishy but so are the governments. The fact that the first guy to see a UFO back in the 40’s was actually misquoted in the media and never did see a saucer shape object and from then on people reported seeing flying saucers does seem suspicious. But what the government claimed isn’t much better. They tried to use the swamp gas explanation with people that lived next to a swamp their whole lives. Unless people grow up in a big city, most of them are experts of there own surroundings. They should be able to discern natural or unnatural (usual or unusual) phenomena in there own environment.
I suspect that the government (which is made up of people with the same limitations as you and me) is just as confused as the public. I think that they stopped investigating and decided to give the UFO issue a conclusion back in the 60’s to avoid showing their own incompetence.
I think it’s very unlikely that what people are seeing up in the sky are extraterrestrials. And I agree with you that most people especially now a day are just misinterpreting natural and ordinary phenomena. But I also don’t think they should be dismissed without a proper investigation.
We may have entered the age of govt./NASA sponsored holograms in the sky…..project Bluebeam.