Identification studies of UFOs
[2] Nevertheless, most officially investigated UFO sightings, such as from the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, have been identified as being due to honest misidentifications of natural phenomena, aircraft, or other prosaic explanations.
The following are some major studies undertaken during the past 70+ years that reported on identification of UFOs: Project Sign lists that "in order to investigate the credibility of their existence the following factors must be considered in any technical analysis":[5] Method of support (lift) Method of propulsion (thrust) Project Blue Book Special Report No.
A key study of BBSR was to statistically compare IFOs and UFOs by six characteristics: color, number of objects, shape, duration of observations, speed, and light brightness.
If there were no significant differences, the two classes were probably the same, the UFOs then representing merely a failure to properly identify prosaic phenomena that could already account for the IFOs.
Like the Air Force, astronomer Allan Hendry found that only a small percentage of cases were hoaxes and that most sightings were actually honest misidentifications of prosaic phenomena.
In this summary table: Both BBSR and Hendry found that three classes of objects or phenomena—astronomical, aircraft, or balloons—accounted for a large majority of identifiable UFO reports (referred to as IFOs), 86% and 83% in the two studies.
Claims of misidentification are after-the-fact analyses, not direct observations, and are often misconstrued by skeptics and UFO advocates alike: They do not suggest that the experiences did not exist, but merely that they can be explained by prosaic causes.
For instance, retrospective analyses of the Jimmy Carter UFO incident of 1969 connect the sighting with the known position of the planet Venus for that time, date, and location.
[7] Gordon Cooper, a strong advocate of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), claimed to have been fooled by the planet Venus when he was a fighter pilot, thinking it a distant enemy plane, and the 1967 "flying cross" of Devon, England[8] and the 1966 Portage County UFO Chase case[9] have both been associated with astronomical sources.
In 2009, Peter Davenport, Director of the National UFO Reporting Center, posted this complaint online: We are receiving hundreds of reports every month of normal, terrestrial events, e.g. over-flights of the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, or satellites; "flares" of light from "Iridium" satellites; the appearance of typical meteors; and observations of normal, "twinkling" stars, planets, contrails, clusters of balloons, etc.
I believe the majority of time I spend on the Hotline is devoted to trying to convince people who have been staring for hours at a star or planet that the object of interest is not a UFO.
[11] Astronomer Phil Plait, in particular, has suggested that Venus is responsible for the majority of all UFO reports[12] The brightest meteors known as bolides are long-lasting fireballs that leave a trail in the sky which can be visible for up to an hour after passing.
The Google Project Manager stated in an article in Wired Magazine that the team used UFO reports to track the balloons progress for one of the launches.
Fata Morgana is a type of mirage responsible for some UFO sightings, by making objects located below the astronomical horizon appear to be hovering in the sky.
As is well known, atmospheric ducting is the explanation for certain optical mirages, and in particular the arctic illusion called "fata morgana" where distant ocean or surface ice, which is essentially flat, appears to the viewer in the form of vertical columns and spires, or "castles in the air."
More recently, Professor Colin Price head of the Geophysics and Planetary Sciences Department at Tel Aviv University has commented that occurrences of upper-atmospheric lightning such as sprites, elves and blue jets could account for some of the strange reports of UFO sightings.
[18] According to New York Magazine writer for the Digital Intelligencer, Jeff Wise, advanced electronic warfare (EW) techniques similar to early "radar spoofing" used by the US military could deceive sensors to give false velocity and position information.
Wise worries that US adversaries have developed EW capabilities that exploit weaknesses in US systems that allow information to be missed or created erroneously.
According to Eghigian, "fears of Zeppelins, rockets and drones have replaced the "celestial wonders" of ancient times", and "affairs here on earth have consistently colored our perceptions of what is going on over our heads".
