Tuesday Night Lights

Is it surprising when reports of UFOs come out of rural areas or is it just sad?

Stephenville, Texas is the latest farming burg to see strange lights in its usually clear, starlit skies. And chatter in newspapers and on radio stations has turned to little green men from outer space and crazy alien technology.

Several dozen people, including a pilot and a county constable, reported seeing a "large silent object with bright lights" flying low and fast across the Texas sky on Tuesday, January 8, 2008. They also said the object's lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane.

A large silent object with bright lights that could change configuration?

Egad, these people have seen a giant flying Christmas tree!

I always wondered what they did with that enormous tree in Rockefeller Center when Christams was over. Well, it turns out, they don't do anything with it, other than fly it the hell out of there after the new year. They were probably just on their way to scuttle the huge, decorated tree out in the Gulf of Mexico when the good folks of Stephenville caught sight of it and mistook it for an alien space craft.

"You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal," Ricky Sorrells of Dublin, Texas said. "It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I'm not crazy."

No, Ricky, you're not crazy. And neither are your friends or the other witnesses --- most likely. But you are grossly ignorant of the way reality works.

First of all, as everyone probably knows, the acronym UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. It simply refers to something that is flying, or otherwise airborne, that cannot be identified. If you think about it, we all probably encounter at least one UFO on a daily basis. There is no shortage of things in the sky that are flying, or appear to be flying, that we cannot identify. That does not mean, however, that they are unidentifiable.

And the fact that we cannot identify them, does not automatically mean they are alien ships from another planet, or time machines, or vehicles from another dimension. It simply means we cannot identify them. I would wager that an extremely high percentage of these types of sightings are nothing more than mundane objects in flight that have been misconstrued as something peculiar.

Either that or these things are objects of man-made origin with which we are simply not familiar.

Imagine the first rural people to set eyes on a dirigible. They saw it flying, but had no idea what the hell they were looking at. More recently, the same thing was true of the stealth bomber. Folks saw this thing flying over them, and since they were unfamiliar with the new aircraft, jumped to all sorts of outrageous conclusions.

In addition to that, we must also take into account how fallible our eyes are.

While federal officials say there's a logical explanation, locals swear that it was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane.

But was it really?

We know that accuracy of perception diminishes at distances, as do reliable judgement of speed and direction of motion. Heck, our eyes can be tricked at close range, depending on vantage point and field of view. Consider a magician's illusions for example. We know white tigers don't float around a stage unencumbered by gravity, but with what the magician allows us to see, it sure looks like they do.

Another example of how our eyes are fooled was in the news not long ago. Remember Hogzilla, the supposed enormous hog?


Well, this hoaxed photograph takes advantage of a principal called forced perspective. By placing the boy at some distance in a precise pose behind a fairly ordinary size hog and the hog itself closer in the camera frame, our brains are forced to see the perspective that the boy is actually leaning on a giant pig. The reality is, he's not even close to it. He's well behind it.

So taking this into consideration, how low was the object the witnesses saw in the sky really flying? How fast was it really moving? Was it really emitting no sound?

Now, I can't say for sure that these principals were at play in the Stephenville sightings. I wouldn't presume to know, because I wasn't there. But when evaluating something you think is unusual, it's a good idea to know how we perceive things before jumping to the conclusion that we're being visited by Klingons or some other form of alien creature.

The good news is, some people take that exact approach:

Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, said no F-16s or other aircraft from his base were in the area the night of January 8, when most people reported the sighting.

Lewis said the object may have been an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes. Lights from the aircraft would seem unusually bright and may appear orange from the setting sun.

"I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner," Lewis said. "With the sun's angle, it can play tricks on you."

Well, whether an airliner, a planet, the moon, a kite, a blimp, or something else completely ordinary, seeing something that we can't explain is fun. But folks let's be realistic when we start looking for explanations and leave the slimy lizards and space monkeys to Will Smith and Stephen Spielberg.