Just noticed the Christian Science Monitor's take on this. http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Discoveries
Ignore the photo in the toy shop at the top - there is an ABC News video at the bottom with more photos. But also this:
Mirages? Hallucinations? Reflections of smog? The Oriental Yeti just got his pilot's license? We'd love to know.
Just like the chupacabra had a logical and realistic explanation the mythical creature is likely a run-of-the-mill mammal with mange so too is there an explanation for flying saucer sightings: mirages.
Specifically, a "superior mirage." A mirage is an optical phenomenon that occurs when light rays are bent to produce an image of a distant object. Mirages can be captured on camera, but the 'objects' they depict are nothing more than refracted light.
A superior mirage create appears above an object, higher in the sky. This mirage forms when cold air lies beneath warm air, known to meteorologists as temperature inversion. Light rays refract downward to the colder air, making the object appear to our eyes as above its actual position.
Christine Pulliam, a spokeswoman from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says that everyone has seen a superior mirage.
"The same phenomenon occurs to the sun every day and makes it appear to be above the horizon when it's actually slightly below it," she told NPR in 2008.
At night, the moving lights from cars on a highway can be refracted, making red taillights and white headlights seem as though they're coming from the sky.
Pulliam's opinion on alien UFOs? She sums up Carl Sagan's famous dictum: "I would say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And if somebody really thinks it is alien visitors or hyperdimensional travelers, they need to come up with a better explanation than eye witness reports."
Judy
No, Judy, not mirages. The UFO mystery has long been solved. They're actually sightings of the planet Venus. (That was a common one in the 1960s.) Oh, no, sorry - it's weather balloons, actually.
I note that the grossly ill-informed author of the piece writes of "flying saucer sightings" in the plural. Ill-informed as there's clearly zero knowledge of the history of the phenomenon.
So it's not just about the closed Chinese air space, but a blanket explanation of all UFO sightings, which is simply ridiculous IMHO. Moreover, writing of "flying saucers" is also most unscientific as a great percentage of UFOs take other forms.
Many airforces of the world have scrambled fighter-jets to intercept UFOs, and the pilots have indeed made contact. At times these incidents have been supported by radar confirmation and even ground-visual confirmation. There have been UFO sightings on NASA flights (presumably the astronauts were not seeing car headlinghts in space?), there have been thousands of multiple-witness sightings of definite craft, thousands of reports - some with enough evidence to really make you think - of encounters with beings from such craft. And on, and on ....
Let's take one case: the Phoenix lights seen by a significant percentage of the population of that city and video'd from multiple angles. Those underneath the object describe it as huge and "blotting out the stars as it passed over", with arrays of lights along the side. Even the state governor saw it and covered that fact up at the time. This was reflected car headlights - fooling many thousands of people and leaving them in awe?
Or maybe it was Venus. No, let's go for "weather balloons"? :confused:
V
Churchill ordered UFO cover-up
It emerges that Winston Churchill ordered a cover-up of UFO reports, and security chiefs at one point were meeting weekly in the 1950s to discuss the matter.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10853905
UFOs have undoubtedly always been with us. Skeptics don't understand that the phenomenon did not begin recently, or with the famous Arnold sighting (when he said he saw what looked like "saucers" and thus the term was coined) in 1947.
It emerges that during WW II, British bombers returning from a bombing raid encountered a UFO, but Churchill in consultation with President Eisenhower, ordered the incident covered up "in case it created mass panic" or overthrew peoples' religious beliefs.
Are we still to believe that such incidents are just "mirages" of car headlights? :confused:
V
Hi V,
How did I guess this post would be here today? 😉
I am open-minded about life on other planets - I think it would be incredibly arrogant to think we were the only ones. However, isn't it too much of a coincidence that so many of these sightings happened during WWII or during the Cold War?
It's a fact that the Germans were working on all sorts of secret developments in both aviation and rocket technology - including a stealth bomber. And who knows what sort of surveillance equipment the Russians were dreaming up during the 50's-90's?
I know that during its years of development, the authorities actively encouraged people to believe that sightings of the stealth bomber were UFOs. If you look at some of the photos here, to me it would be incredibly easy to think it was a UFO as it shot past you, especially if you didn't know such a shape of aircraft existed! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-2_Spirit
Just my two cents' worth! I'll be interested to read some of the reports that are being released though.
Judy
A quickie. 🙂
"that so many of these sightings happened during WWII or during the Cold War?" from Judy.
Statistically it just isn't true, Judy. Sightings started to get reported more and more as media developed. Even in previous centuries, but certainly in the 1930s on as there was more access to newspapers. As the population of nations became more interactive with media and had ways of reporting such occurences, so reports increased. The end of the Cold War had zero effect upon the number of reports which continue apace to this day.
If you actually read and study the data, these simply are not human craft. There are untold hundreds of accounts of occupants, and while an individual may make up a story, once you get deeply into the data it's clear that you are dealing with a global reality. But I feel like a physicist trying to convince people of the 1500s that electricity exists ... the data has to be studied. And there's a lot of it! Then one can have opinions based upon the facts rather than (not being personal to you at all) - but folk who don't know the data just make wild statements which are laughable if the actual information is known.
HP isn't a great place to discuss UFOs since few here have studied the data deeply over time. Well, but yey, the thread's here anyway! 😀
V