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

Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. However, UFO enthusiasts usually point out that we have far more evidence than these accounts. We have cameras.

We have all seen footage of UFOs on television. Usually it’s an amateur photographer, perhaps someone on vacation with a video camera, who sees a distant object and quickly gets it on tape.

I am always immediately suspicious of such sightings, specifically because of my own experience with the ducks. A blurry object seen from a great distance is a poor piece of evidence for extraterrestrial visitors. It could be any number of common things, from ducks to balloons. Airplanes headed straight at you can appear to hover for a long time (I once thought an airplane making an approach to an airport behind me was the planet Mars; it was stationary in the sky and glowing red). Helicopters actually can hover, and have odd lights on them. A shakily held camera makes the object appear to move. I have seen quite a few TV shows showing footage of a breathless videographer exclaiming how an object is moving, when it’s obviously the unsteady hand of the person that is moving the camera.

Worse, the camera itself distorts the image. A famous UFO tape shows a faint dot that, as the camera zooms in, gets resolved as a diamond-shaped craft. Actually, the diamond shape was due to the internal mechanisms of the camera, and when the videographer zoomed in the object took this shape because it was out of focus.

Modern electronic cameras have all sorts of odd defects that can distort images in unfamiliar ways. Another famous series of shots shows UFOs that are very bright with a very dark spot trailing them. UFO believers claim that this is due to some sort of space drive using new physics we don’t understand. Actually, this is more likely an effect in the camera’s electronics. A bright object can cause a dark spot to appear next to it in the camera’s detector due to the way the image is generated. I have seen similar effects in Hubble Space Telescope images.

My point is, don’t attribute to spaceships what you can attribute to yourself or your equipment.

On the pseudodocumentary TV show Sightings, which gullibly and unskeptically presents all manner of pseudoscience as fact, I saw a segment in which a photographer claims that hundreds of UFOs can be seen all the time. He puts his camera directly underneath an awning and points it to just below the Sun. The awning shades the Sun just enough to put the camera in shadow. He then turns it on, and voila! You can see dozens of airborne objects flitting this way and that. He calls this method the “solar obliteration” technique, and says that without it we would never see the flying objects.

The photographer claimed that these were UFOs. I was amazed; he had nothing on tape but fluff blowing in the wind. He didn’t bother performing even the simplest of tests to try to find out what these things were. If they were cottonwood seeds, for example (which is what they look like to me), a fan blowing near his camera might settle the issue. If that didn’t work, he could set up two cameras spaced a few meters apart and aimed in the same direction. A distant object would appear in slightly different places in the cameras’ fields of view. You can see this yourself by holding your thumb up at arm’s length and looking at it first with one eye closed, and then the other. Your thumb will appear to move back and forth compared to more distant objects because the angle at which you are viewing it is changing. This method, called parallax, can be used to determine the distance to objects. Our intrepid UFO photographer never tried it, so we may never know if his objects were interstellar travelers or simply a tree trying to be fruitful and multiply.

Another thing to note when listening to UFO claims is the estimation of size and distance. This is always a red flag for me when I hear a UFO report. Someone says it is a kilometer across and twenty kilometers away, but how do they know it isn’t a meter across, and twenty meters away? Without one measurement, you cannot possibly determine the other.

People who should know better make this mistake as well. Take Dr. Jack Kasher, for example. He is a physics teacher at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He believes that UFOs are in fact spaceships populated by aliens. His claim to fame involves a bit of footage from STS 48, a Space Shuttle flight from 1991. During the mission the cameras were pointed down, toward the Earth. The cameras used at night are extremely sensitive and can see outlines of the continents, even in the dark.

In the now-famous footage, we see specks of light moving in the camera’s field of view. Suddenly, there is a flash of light. One of the specks then makes a sharp-angled turn, and another shoots in from off-camera, going right through where the other speck was.

Kasher claims that this is evidence of alien spacecraft. The first point of light is an alien ship. The burst of light seen is the flare from a ground-based missile launch or a secret test of a Star Wars defense. The second point of light is the missile or beam weapon itself. The first dot, the alien ship, then makes an evasive maneuver to avoid being blown back to wherever it came from. According to Kasher, the film has captured an interplanetary battle.

Needless to say, I disagree with him.

So do a lot of other folks. These include Shuttle astronaut Ron Parise and space program analyst James Oberg. Both have discussed what really happened on STS 48. The specks of light are actually bits of ice floating near the Shuttle. The particles of ice form on the outside of the Shuttle on every mission, and can get jolted loose when the rockets fire. Once separated, they tend to float near the Shuttle. The flash of light seen was a vernier rocket, a small rocket that controls the direction in which the Shuttle points. It does not generate much thrust, which is why you don’t suddenly see the Shuttle moving during the burst. (Kasher claimed that a rocket firing would obviously move the Shuttle but neglected to research just how much thrust the rocket gave off.) The rocket burst hitting the first bit of ice is what suddenly changes its course, and the second bit of light flashing by is simply another ice particle accelerated by the rocket. If you look at the footage closely, you can see it doesn’t actually get very close to the first particle, making this a poor demonstration of Star Wars technology.

Kasher has made quite an industry of going on TV shows and showing this footage, which he clearly does not understand. He even sells a video of his analysis of the footage ($29.95 plus shipping and handling). I’d save my money if I were you.

I am commonly asked if I believe in life in space, and if aliens are visiting us. I always answer, “Yes, and no.” This confuses people. How can I believe in aliens when I don’t believe in UFOs?

It’s actually easy. Space is vast, terribly vast. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our Galaxy, and it’s becoming clear that many — if not most — have planets. There are billions of galaxies like ours in the universe. In my opinion, it’s silly to think that in all the universe we are the only planet to have the right conditions for life to arise.

But even if the Galaxy is humming with life, don’t expect ET to come here to poke at us, draw funny patterns in our corn fields, and mutilate our cattle. The very vastness of space makes that unlikely. Even with highly advanced technology, it would be a lot of work to explore every star and planet in the Milky Way. And if their technology is so advanced, how come they crashed here in Roswell in 1947? It seems unlikely that we would be able to shoot down a spaceship; that’s like cows being able to take down a fighter plane. And if their technology is so advanced, why would they crash a few kilometers from the end of a journey that lasted for trillions of kilometers?

Many people assume that faster-than-light travel is possible. Although there is no real evidence for it, let’s assume that travel through hyperspace, warpdrive, or some other method is feasible.

If that’s true, and some alien race knows about it, where are they?

Our civilization has been around for a few thousand years, and we are starting to explore the near reaches of space. If we had faster-than-light travel, we could populate the entire Galaxy in just a few thousand years. Even with slower-than-light ships we could do it in a few million years at most.

That may sound like a long time, but not in the galactic sense. Elsewhere, a star like the Sun, only a few hundred million years older, might have had a booming civilization on one of its planets while trilobites swam in our own oceans. If this civilization decided to colonize the Galaxy, then by now the whole place should be filled with them.

Yet we have no proof they are here, so you have to assume that they have some sort of Prime Directive, as in Star Trek, to leave young civilizations alone. But then, why do we see so many of their spaceships? UFO enthusiasts want to have it both ways; they believe that incredibly advanced aliens come here in spaceships, yet these aliens are still so dumb that a bunch of primitives who barely understand atomic energy can