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A GenePoool.com Essay
UFOs
It's late at night. You're walking along a quiet country road and enjoying the stars in the cloudless sky. It's a great view. You notice that one of the stars is moving, and not at the barely noticeable pace one might expect of a star that drifts out of view in time with the earth's rotation. No, this star is zig-zagging; clearly it's NOT a star. This pinpoint of light is making a series of remarkable turns that also rule out an airplane of some sort. So what is it?
A UFO?
Well, sure. You, the observer, are unable to identify it positively, it's flying, and it's a visible object. That satisfies the acronym definition rather clearly.
What I find endlessly fascinating is how quickly our logic circuits seem to malfunction when confronted with a UFO. What makes the conclusion that our unidentified object is perforce an alien space craft seem so logical?
There are other questions we should be asking about our mysterious luminous object. First off, we have to ask how far away from us it is. The answer to this question is half the battle. Consider how hard it is to really know the distance of the viewer to the object when examining the night sky. There is NOTHING up there we can compare the light to in order to determine it's altitude.
The stars are a good example of this. Some of them are millions of light years away, and some are hundreds of light years away, and there's no way to tell the difference with the naked eye. For centuries mankind assumed the stars were fixed in a solid black firmament, because, well, that's what it looked like. So ingrained was this assumption that a comet was, in effect, a threat to religious doctrine.
An object a mile in the air will appear to move very slowly when viewed from the surface. Naturally, the closer the object gets, the more rapid it appears. So something a few hundred feet in the air that is mistakenly assumed to be much higher will seem to be moving at incredible speed. Now imagine the object we're looking at is a silver latex balloon getting buffeted by low altitude winds. Its movement will be sudden, random, and unpredictible. If we start by assuming the balloon is a larger object much higher in the atmosphere, these little wind-blown movements will seem like the dramatic course alterations of a craft whose design and propulsion cannot possibly be man-made.
Of course a balloon is not the only possibility, but it's a start.
If you spend enough free time staring at the sky, you're going to see things you can't explain, especially if you have the advantage of not living near a city. (City lights tend to create an atmospheric glow which blocks much of the night sky.) A short list of the unexpected objects might include:
--man-made sattelites. There are a LOT of them up there, and they are only occasionally visible to the naked eye; they might, for instance, reflect sunlight for a portion of their orbit.
--meteors. The Earth is traveling through space in an orbit that takes slightly more than 365 days to complete. Space debris left in the wake of any number of asteroids or comets can cross the planet's orbital path. That debris, when entering the atmosphere, burns brightly until, usually, there's none of it left to hit the Earth's surface. The Perseid meteor shower is one example of this.
--high altitude weather balloons. While not much in use any more, weather balloons can explain a lot of classic sightings.
--a planet. This is a favorite of UFO adherents, because, frankly, it sounds silly. But at certain times, at certain angles or altitudes, other planets can seem quite large. For example, in January, 1987, a Japanese Airlines pilot traveling over Alaska was chased for an hour by the planet Jupiter.
--a reflection. In certain atmospheric conditions-- such as the presence of dark, cumulous clouds-- lights from one part of the Earth can reflect off the sky and be seen from another part of the Earth. For instance, the headlights of a vehicle climbing up a hill can be seen reflected off of the clouds by a witness on the other side of the hill. What's more jarring is that the reflected headlights can be seen moving, because the source is moving.
--a hoax. Many of the most famous sightings turned out to be blatant hoaxes.
There are other, more esoteric explanations, and of course each sighting has to be treated individually, but this short list can explain the vast majority of cases.
There is another factor to consider, a much more important factor: some people want and expect to see UFOs. I don't think it comes as a surprise to anyone that imagination effects our visual interpretation. The JAL pilot mentioned above is a good example. His 1987 report of a UFO was not his first. Yet nobody else in the cockpit saw what he saw, nor did any other airplane in the area.
Imaginative interpretations of mundane phenomena makes for some of the more interesting stories to come out of UFO literature.
In 1980, soldiers at a US Army base outside of Ipswich, England, reported that a UFO landed in the nearby Rendlesham forest. Not only did they chase the UFO, unsuccessfully, they also found a landing site. Subsequent investigation determined that the soldiers had been chasing a lighthouse; they were on high ground and the lighthouse was in a sunken shoreline, such that the top of the lighthouse was eye level. The "landing site" turned out to be natural marks made by rabbits.
In 1989, the town of Gulf Breeze, Florida, became the UFO capitol of the country after footage shot by a local resident of a flying saucer he reportedly witnessed while standing in his back yard became public. His newfound fame got him moved to a higher tax bracket and a new home, which turned out to be a problem as he neglected to take his model flying saucer with him. It was found a year later by the house's new residents. A local neighborhood boy even came forward and admitted he helped his former neighbor make the famous videotape. Nonetheless, there have been numerous sightings in Gulf Breeze since, a testament to the power of suggestion.
Evidence of suggestibility can also be seen in the objects we choose to witness. The modern UFO movement effectively began on June 24, 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine glowing objects over Mt. Rainier. Arnold's exact words were that the objects "flew like a saucer would if skipped over water." He did NOT call them "flying saucers," and in fact the objects he reported were round balls of light. But the papers reported them as "flying saucers." Before long a lot of people were seeing their own "flying saucers." They saw what they THOUGHT Arnold had seen, because that was what they were expecting to see.
A more remarkable example is the airship hysteria at the turn of the century. Newspapers across the country widely reported that it was only a matter of time before an enterprising inventor created an airship capable of traveling across the country, and interest was so high that millions turned their gaze to the heavens. From 1896 to 1897, there were over 10,000 eyewitness reports of airships, none of them substantiated. In every case the object witnessed looked something like a dirigible, which was what the artistic renditions in the papers suggested manmade, self-propelled flying objects might look like. People looked up, and they saw what they expected-- or rather hoped-- to see. Ultimately, what would have been a marvelous argument in favor of the flying saucer theory goes by the boards as, oddly, none of the late-19th century UFOs looked anything like a saucer.
Imagination seems to be the critical factor to the prevalence of UFO sightings, despite the fact that most reported sightings nowadays come from multiple individuals. For example, as I write this a sighting of a "blimp-like object" is being reported has having been spotted over Illinois at around 4 A.M. on January 5th. The witnesses consist mainly of police officers on separate patrols in separate towns, and also one private citizen. It's too early to determine exactly what, if anything, was actually seen that morning, but I'm willing to bet the radio was an early contributor to it. I'd also bet that the one witness who wasn't a policeman was listening to the police band.
Here's how it works. One person, probably someone who is interested in seeing their own UFO, spots something strange in the sky. They call a couple of friends, who dutifully run outside to bear witness, after which they call friends and the pattern repeats, growing exponentially as it does. There is no reason to assume that any of the subsequent people even see the same thing the first person did; if they can't spot it they might still call around to see if "the object" has moved. At some point, someone calls the police, or perhaps the press, or both. Soon it's being reported that dozens of people spotted a UFO over such and such a place on such and such a night. Now people who were out that night are thinking to themselves "did I see something strange in the sky too?" Some of them will answer yes, even though they might have actually seen nothing at all. Why? Why not? A UFO is exciting. Who wouldn't want to be one of the few who saw one themselves?
This may sound like a ridiculous scenario, but this pattern repeats itself so often it's a wonder UFOs aren't seen MORE often. James "The Amazing" Randi once tested this phenomenon when he was a guest on a New York radio show. After being introduced he told the host he'd seen this incredibly bright object in the sky as he was driving to the studio. He asked if any of the listeners had seen the same thing. In under an hour they had a hundred or more calls, complete with detailed descriptions (which were notoriously contradictory, as most UFO descriptions are.) It was all quite remarkable, especially considering Randi had made the entire thing up.
If that many people can lay claim to witnessing an object that never existed, imagine how easy it is for a benign object-- like a meteor-- to become an advanced alien space craft in the minds of the eager witnesses.
In the end, there are far more natural explanations
for UFOs than most people have the patience to consider. The "alien
space craft" theory is just too tantalizing, which I guess
is understandable, although personally, if I were going to be
visited by advanced space creatures, I'd want them to be smart
enough at least to know when to turn off their headlights.
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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