Bad Astronomy. Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'

Misidentified Flying Objects: UFOs and Illusions of the Mind and Eye

On February 11, 1997, at approximately 3:00 A.M. local time, I had a close encounter with a UFO. Actually, multiple UFOs.

I was in Florida with my family to attend a Space Shuttle launch. I had been working at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland for nearly two years, helping to calibrate a new camera that was to be placed on board the Hubble Space Telescope. All of us who had worked on the camera got passes to see the Shuttle launch in Florida, and we were all excited about seeing our camera lofted into space.

The launch was scheduled for 3:55 a.m. That’s not the best time to appreciate the spectacle and fury of rocket launch, but the vagaries of orbital mechanics demanded such a liftoff. My mom volunteered to baby-sit our infant daughter Zoe, so my father, my wife, my nephew, and I made our way to Cape Canaveral around 1:00 a.m. We quickly found out that several thousand other people were also attending. Too excited to nap, my father and I wandered around talking to the other attendees. Many people had telescopes set up to watch the distant shuttle, proudly standing under the intense glare of multiple spotlights. To see it we had to peer across a long stretch of the Banana River that separates the cape from mainland Florida. The cape is surrounded by water, and by wildlife. We actually saw a couple of alligators, which is a weird sight so close to such a technological marvel.

About an hour before the launch, I spotted some unusual lights in the night sky, a dozen or more, to the right of the launch pad from our viewpoint. They were perhaps at the same distance from us as the pad, about 10 kilometers (6 miles), although it was hard to tell. My father pointed out that they were moving, so we kept watching. The movement was very slow, as if they were hovering. I figured it was a group of distant spotting planes, but then remembered that NASA only uses one or two planes to sweep around the area. No other planes are allowed near the shuttle; it is jealously guarded by NASA for obvious reasons.

My next guess was birds, but these objects were glowing. Balloons? No, they were moving too quickly. No satellites group together like that. My excitement mounted, despite my more rational thoughts. What were they? As I watched, I noticed that they were moving together, but not in a straight line. They weaved slightly. That ruled out satellites and a host of other mechanical objects.

I refused to think of any ridiculous explanations involving anything, well, ridiculous. But what were these things? All I could see through binoculars were glowing dots. Their flight path was taking them to my right as I continued to watch them through binoculars. Slowly, faintly, I could hear a noise they were making. It was eerie, odd, difficult to place. Then, suddenly, the noise got louder, and the objects in my binoculars resolved themselves. My mind and heart raced. I was seeing…

… a flock of ducks. As they flew by us they were just a few hundred meters away, and they were unmistakably terrestrial waterfowl. The noise we heard earlier was their quacking, muffled by distance, and their otherworldly glow was just the reflected light of the fleet of spotlights flooding the Shuttle pad. The ducks’ weaving flight was obvious now, too. They appeared to be hovering when we first saw them because they were so far away and were heading roughly toward us.

I never allowed myself to think that they were truly UFOs, but what was that odd feeling in the pit of my stomach while I watched them, and why was I vaguely disappointed when we identified them as ducks? I laughed to my dad, maybe a little bit too loudly, and we resumed our vigil over the shuttle.

I learned two interesting lessons from this experience. Well, three: the first would be not to mistake ducks for alien spaceships. But the other two are a bit more profound. One is that there is a human need to believe in extraordinary things. Over the course of our lives we build a mental database of ordinary events. We see trees, airplanes, buildings, people we know, and we catalog them in our minds. When we see something that doesn’t fit into the picture we have of life, it can be hard to categorize. It’s easy to get excited by it, to wonder about it. Sometimes we wind up either identifying it as something we already know or setting up a new category for it.

This happens in science all the time. Say a scientist spots a new phenomenon. It might turn out to be something we already know about that is seen in a new way, or maybe it’s something actually new that deserves study. But so far, with all the observations made by thousands or even millions of scientists, not a single phenomenon has ever been shown to be anything but natural, and certainly nothing appears to be guided by an intelligent hand not our own.

But the need to believe in such things is firmly planted in our collective psyche. There is something wondrous in seeing something we cannot explain. I like mysteries, for example, and I’ll worry over them until I can solve them. I think there may be some hardwiring in our brains that almost demands us to want mystery in life. If everything were explained, where would the fun be? So even I, a hardheaded and skeptical scientist, once allowed myself to be momentarily swept up in a nonrational thought process.

The third lesson from my close encounter that night at Cape Canaveral is that even an astronomer with years of experience and training in identifying objects in the sky can make a mistake, even a silly one. Together with a series of unusual circumstances (the objects were glowing, they were distant, they were headed roughly toward me) it was possible and perhaps even easy to make a false conclusion, or at least skip over the correct one.

In my opinion, these two processes — a need for wonder, and an all-too-easy ability to be fooled — account for the vast majority of UFO sightings. I am not a social psychologist, so I don’t want to ponder any further about the human desire to wonder. It’s fun to think about it, but I am not qualified to analyze it other than as a layman.

But I am a scientist and an astronomer. So let’s take a look at the visual and physical phenomenon of UFOs.

A lot of people claim to see strange things in the sky — moving lights, changing colors, objects that follow them. But let’s think about this for a minute: how many people are really familiar with the sky? I have found that there are things that happen in the sky about which people are completely unaware. Many have no idea you can see planets and satellites with the naked eye. When I talk to the public about such optical phenomena as haloes around the Sun and sundogs (teardrop-shaped glowing patches in the sky that are caused by sunlight being bent by ice crystals in the air), the vast majority has never heard of them, let alone seen them.

If someone is not familiar with things that are in the sky all the time, how can they be sure they are seeing something unusual?

This is not as ridiculous as it sounds. Venus, for example, can be amazingly bright, far brighter than any starlike object in the sky — in fact, it’s the third brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. Seen low on the horizon, Venus can flicker in brightness and change color as the atmosphere bends its light. If you are driving, it can appear to follow you through the trees.

It’s common to mistake brightness for size. I receive e-mails from people all the time asking me about the huge object they saw in the sky, and it usually turns out to be Venus. This planet is so far away that to the unaided eye it looks like a star, although a bright one. Unless you have unusually sharp vision, without at least a pair of binoculars you can’t see Venus as anything other than an unresolved dot. Yet, because of its tremendous radiance, Venus is commonly mistaken by people as a huge disk in the sky. That’s why it accounts for the majority of UFO sightings.

If you are not familiar with the sky, any unusual object can make you jump to erroneous conclusions. But there is a group of people who are very familiar with the sky — by some estimates there are as many as 100,000 amateur astronomers in the United States alone — who spend many hours every week doing nothing but looking into the sky. They own telescopes and binoculars and spend every clear night outside looking up.

Think about that for a moment. These folks are looking at the sky all the time. Yet, of all the people I have had approach me or e-mail me to say they have seen a UFO, not one has been an amateur astronomer. As a matter of fact, I have never heard about any amateur astronomers seeing something in the sky they absolutely could not explain. Yet they spend far more time looking at the sky than lay people and statistically should see far more UFOs! How can this be?

Easy. Remember, the amateur astronomers study the sky. They know what’s in it and what to expect. When they see a meteor, or Venus, or sunlight glinting off the solar panel of a satellite, they know it’s not an alien spaceship. Amateur astronomers know better and, in fact, all the amateurs to whom I have spoken about this are very skeptical about UFOs being alien spaceships. This is a very strong argument that there are mundane explanations for the vast majority of UFO sightings.