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Ask Slashdot: What Is Your View On UFO Sightings?
dryriver writes: UFOs sightings have been reported in the tens of thousands over the last decades. In the past, some have seen flying cigar-shaped craft (blimps?), some flying triangles, some more rounded-looking flying saucers. Often the apparent spacecraft does something improbable like standing completely still in the sky and then shooting off to somewhere at an incredible speed. Some sightings are just lights or light formations flying around or dancing around in the night sky -- which could be military aircraft like helicopters and F16s training at night. There seem to be people who genuinely see stuff that is hard to explain, people who fake UFO sightings, photos and videos for profit to keep the "UFO industry" of websites, radio shows and magazines afloat, and yet others that think a regular airplane flying at night with its lights on is a UFO. What is your view on all this? Are we being visited from outer space? Is it prototype aircraft that look like UFOs to the untrained eye? Was some 190 IQ inventor-prankster having fun with quadcopter drones with colored lights four decades before quadcopters became a thing (hey, tons of people have created fake crop-circles in the past)? Where do all these supposed UFO sightings and reports come from? Did events like the famous "Battle Of Los Angeles" actually happen? And do you find any UFO reports credible at all?
there's just always some mundane explanation.
The explanation is not always mundane. There have been several examples of small plane pilots intentionally spoofing people by flying in formation with weird synchronized lights. That is almost as cool as the guys that faked all crop circles. I really admire these people. Their ingenuity and hard work have made the world a more interesting place.
Most of the stuff on Youtube is fake. Check out Captain Disillusion's channel. After you've seen a few videos, you won't trust many videos on Youtube any longer. He easily spots indicators that I would never recognize. It's just a pity that he can't produce more - the production quality of his videos is very, very high, so it takes a lot of time to make them.
That being said, among the more legit sources such as multiple recordings from TV channels, these are very rare and I've never seen anything that wasn't easily explained as an airplane, laser-show or reflection of headlights in the sky. The latter seems to be the most common phenomenon. They are also described by eye witnesses very often. When you see some blurry illuminated objects in the sky that are static or in slow uniform motion and then suddenly accelerate extremely fast, maybe changing their course rapidly, then chances are very, very high that you've seen the reflections of lights of some vehicle on ground.
All of that is not to say that you haven't seen a UFO, APK. I'm just pointing out that most of the sightings are not very credible. (Why did I write this? UFOs and possible life on extrasolar planets are among my long-term interests and I'm writing science fiction novels in my spare time.)
I had a similar experience when I was younger, only it was broad daylight. There were bright sometimes triangle-shaped sometimes cigar shaped objects that were dancing about and seeming to move at impossible speeds. They looked metallic. Finally, after many minutes, I finally realized they were birds when they flew under some darker clouds, and were much closer than I thought. The bright sun was catching their feathers and the rest of the bird was hard to see in the bright sky. Really bizarre looking, and very surprising when it turned out to be a couple of birds.