Amateur astronomy and alien visitors
If you do the math , you ’ ll realize that amateurs are collectively peering through an area equivalent to the entire celestial canopy ten times a day ! Since the first modern UFO sightings in the 1940s , all those hobbyists have done this more than 200,000 times .
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Few , if any , discoveries would be more consequential than finding extraterrestrial beings , right ? Evidence for aliens would shake up the world . Well , consider this : every day an average of 30 Americans say that they have that evidence . They ’ re not SETI researchers , nor are they men-in-black submitting their daily incident reports to
Looking For ET
by Seth Shostak
some covert federal agency . They ’ re merely members of the public who think that they ’ ve seen something in the sky that ’ s more than passing strange : a UFO . Still , the world is not shaken up . The reason is simple . The hard evidence for visitation is missing and the anecdotal evidence is as unimpressive as a $ 40 suit . Every day I get phone calls and emails from people who have seen something odd above their heads – something they believe is immensely important because , don ’ t you know , it ’ s compelling evidence for E . T . My computer disk is replete with videos sent to me that show peculiar spots of light flitting around the sky like bacchanalian fireflies . The spots often seem to pulsate in size and sometimes have strange markings . My guess is that the majority of these UFO videos are shot with cell phones aimed at airplanes or perhaps an iridium satellite . The autofocus feature on these devices is easily confused by a small , bright object against a dark background , and “ hunts ” around trying to sharpen the shot . This , of course , causes the light to grow and shrink , and the spot often exhibits the kind of diffraction pattern
you last saw in high school physics . Unfortunately , many of the people who send me these videos have forgotten high school physics . They mistakenly interpret these patterns as structure on the alien spacecraft . The wild movement of the spots is simply the inevitable consequence of hand-holding the phone . Of course , such prosaic explanations seldom satisfy those who ’ ve made the videos . Additionally , the recent revelation that the Pentagon spent five years ( and $ 22 million ) investigating anomalous aerial phenomena has strengthened the belief that Earth has extraterrestrial houseguests . UFO proponents argue that the best evidence is still being kept under wraps by government drones concerned that the citizenry will go gaga if Washington reveals what it knows . That ’ s conspiracy theory , but there ’ s more to this story and it involves the work of amateur astronomers . In 1997 , a set of lights seen falling from the sky were observed over Phoenix , Ariz ., together with some mysterious high-altitude craft . This incident was atypical because there were hordes of witnesses . The Phoenix Lights were quickly inducted into the pantheon of credible UFO stories . The military insists that the lights were flares being dropped behind the Sierra Estrella mountain range by planes from Luke Air Force Base , west of Phoenix . Fair enough . But explanations for the highaltitude craft were less straightforward . Maybe they were alien spaceships ? It turns out that a 20-year old amateur astronomer , Mitch Stanley , spotted them with his 10-inch Dobsonian reflector and claimed they were unmistakably “ planes ”. The local population didn ’ t believe him . But let ’ s face it : the public is hardly expert at interpreting what they see in the night sky . Amateur astronomers , on the other hand ,
Sky ’ s Up