Top 7 phenomena commonly confused with UFO's

It doesn't take much effort to convince people that they have seen a UFO. An unusual cloud or an exceptionally bright planet does its job. Here are the top 7 phenomena that lead to space-related hoaxes.

Lightning (Sprite)

Mysterious UFO sightings may go hand in hand with a natural weather phenomenon known as sprite flares high in the atmosphere caused by thunderstorms. Sprites suddenly appear when lightning from a thunderstorm excites an electric field over the storm, producing dancing flashes of bright light.

By Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth." - http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/photo.pl?mission=ISS031&roll=E&frame=10712, Public Domain

Sprites can take the form of fast-moving electric balls, although they can also form stripes or tendrils.

By Abestrobi - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4262250

Missile tests

In December 2009, an impressive spiral light show appeared in the sky over northern Norway: a giant spiral with a greenish-blue ray of light coming from its center illuminated the sky in the form of a raindrop effect.

It looked like a wormhole in another dimension, but it turned out that the lights were caused by a Russian missile that failed immediately after launch, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. The Bulava rocket went out of control, thereby creating a mysterious effect of a rotating spiral.

Unusual clouds

One day, footage of a giant halo in the overcast sky over Moscow appeared on YouTube. The video had everything you needed to spark UFO rumors. It's grainy. At some point, a dark pointed object flies out of the ring. There's even a panicked-sounding radio broadcast in the background.

Cold-blooded meteorologists hurried to end the story. It was just an optical illusion, the reason that sunlight got into a cloud disturbed by wind or aircraft movement, just in the right direction. Most likely, it was what is known as the hole punch cloud. They occur in cirrus clouds, which often consist of ice crystals and supercooled water droplets, the water temperature is below the freezing point, but still in liquid form. The physical properties that hold these clouds together are very fragile, and when disturbed by a jet plane or wind, the droplets can instantly freeze or evaporate, forming a hole in the cloud cover.

Balloons

On the afternoon of October 13, hundreds of people in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan saw a cluster of silvery, shiny lights flickering from above. Naturally, the initial descriptions of the alleged UFO varied greatly: some people have reported seeing one large, slow-moving object full of light, while others say they have seen almost half a dozen creatures.

The strange flickering lights turned out to be caused by 12 helium balloons that escaped from an engagement party, about 20 kilometers away. The balloons were accidentally released at 1 p.m., and the first of the UFO sightings occurred that evening...

Venus

The planet Venus is often mistaken for a UFO. To viewers on Earth, the second planet from the sun seems to be a bright light that hangs in the sunset sky, it seems that it slowly soars at dusk, eclipsing all the stars except the sun. Since Venus orbits the sun inside our own orbit, from our point of view, it is always near the Sun in the evening or in the morning, and people often mistake it for a moving UFO.

Venus is next to Jupiter

Aircraft

Here is proof that anything that looks unusual in the sky can cause noise. A message came from the USA that a mysterious rocket was launched off the coast of California. The panic was caused by a video recording of an inversion trail piercing clouds illuminated by the rising sun. No one could definitively say what it was at the time when Defense Department officials reported no scheduled rocket launches, NORAD and USNORTCOM detected no foreign activity, and the FAA did not authorize any commercial space launches in the area.

After a thorough investigation, many experts now believe that the strip was the trace of an ordinary jet plane, which, as it turned out, hung longer than usual. Contrails are most pronounced at sunrise or sunset, and often the fact that they appear in an unexpected place causes rumors about UFOs or experimental military aircraft.

Military experiments

The late 1940s and early 1950s were a great time to spot UFOs and aliens in New Mexico, primarily because that's where the Air Force conducted some of its top-secret research. One of these programs was known as Project Mogul and involved balloons with microphones rising to great heights in an attempt to catch sound waves caused by Soviet atomic bomb tests. The Air Force has since confirmed that the crash of one of these balloons in 1947 resulted in the formation of debris that led to the Roswell UFO incident.

A plane that looks like a flying saucer

Another military experiment provided bodies for this UFO. In the 1950s, Air Force scientists dropped several dozen anthropomorphic mannequins from airplanes to test new high-altitude parachutes and determine whether the bodies would enter a dangerous rotation when falling. The results of these studies contributed to the development of parachute designs and airtight suits worn by fighter pilots and the first astronauts...

As you can see, it is very easy to mislead an observer, especially pre-processed by the media. However, this does not mean that all objects can be explained by a skeptical approach. There are a lot of unexplained things in the sky. The purpose of this article is to exclude the fact that UFOs are not

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About author:

Serg Toporkov Ufologist, Ph.D., blogger, I go on my own expeditions for UFOs. I use scientific methods to investigate the UAP phenomenon. Write to me

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UFOs  top 7  UFO  Project Mogul  Roswell UFO incident  Venus  analysis  Chelsea  UFO sightings  Sprite