Lights in the Sky
Credit: H.E. Bond, E. Nelan, M. Burleigh,
J.B. Holberg, STScI, NASA; The bright star Sirius,
seen through the Hubble Space Telescope.
It's time to talk about those lights in the sky. "What does he mean?" you’re thinking, "This is an astronomy blog; isn't astronomy all about those lights in the sky?"
I'm not talking about those lights–stars, planets, Sun, and Moon. Those are the ones we've identified. I'm talking about the "U-word" of astronomy: UFOs.
Of the phone calls and emails I get from people with a sky question, one of the most common categories are amazing things they've seen in the sky that they can't explain or identify.
Here's the archetypal anecdote, told to me by someone who we'll simply call "Bob." Bob came into work a few days ago, and through the fog to the east saw the Full Moon. To his credit, Bob couldn’t believe his eyes, for he knew enough about the ways of the Moon to know it shouldn't be anywhere near Full at the time. After a period of bewilderment, Bob saw the light: he was looking at the Sun, filtered drastically by the fog.
Very often, I am able to supply the inquisitor with a plausible candidate for the apparition they've witnessed. They say there are more car accidents around Full Moon. I also note a rise in sightings of inexplicable lights when Venus or the bright star Sirius is visible in the sky.
Venus can be astonishingly bright. I recall in childhood getting up at 4:00 AM to see Venus. Even though I expected it to be bright, I was still taken by surprise. I could see my own shadow cast by Venus' light onto a nearby juniper bush!
Sirius, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, was that quintessential sight that sparked my interest in astronomy. Its light, refracted and distorted by atmospheric effects, forms a twinkling, prismatic bouquet of color, making it a unique spectacle among stars.
Bright meteor trails are another impetus for those urgent, late-night calls to the astronomy 9-1-1 voice line (my phone).
But, of course, there are the inevitable accounts that I cannot give a plausible explanation for. It's the stories of moving objects with blinking lights, which the observer swears was not an airplane, blimp, helicopter, or other explicable vehicle, that leaves me with little choice but to say, "Gee whiz, I wish I’d seen that too!" On these occasions, the plausible explanation must be that they have seen some kind of aircraft, no matter how unusual it may have appeared. I don't rule out extraterrestrial spacecraft–having no evidence for or against–but I'm never in a mood to suggest that's what someone saw…
Okay, here's my embarrassing UFO story. Back in my 20's, I was driving north along 395, from Death Valley toward Mono Lake. Suddenly, a cloud appeared out of thin air, ahead in the distance. Then, just as suddenly, the cloud vanished! I blinked my eyes, and it appeared again! I stopped the car, there about a mile from the middle of nowhere, got out, closed the door, walked to the front of the car, put my hands on my hips, and set my eyes and jaw in a stance determined to understand what I was seeing. Then, I realized something, nodded my head, rolled my eyes, and said out loud, "I just locked my keys in the car."
Epilogue: I did regain entry to the car by exploiting a flaw in its design–and the mysterious appearing/disappearing cloud turned out to be a large flock of pelicans turning together, in unison presenting their brown tops and white undersides… mystery solved.
Benjamin Burress is a staff astronomer at The Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.
3 Comments
After posting my blog, I realized I could have included a couple more relevant pieces of information–namely, that both Venus and Sirius, which I showcase as sparkers of "what's that in the sky!?" calls, are becoming visible in the skies. Venus is currently playing her role as the "Morning Star," a very bright white flare low in the east just before sunrise. Sirius, now visible in the morning skies, rising around 3:00 AM, after Orion, will rise earlier and earlier, until it is a regular and accessible fixture in the evening winter skies. As if on cue to my blog, today I received two astonished emails asking what that bright thing is in the east just before dawn…. Told you.
Don't really know who lse to send this question to, new at this seeing things in the sky thing. Have you heard anything about the twinkling, red, blue and yellow lights in North Carolina which seem to hover in one spot for seconds to hours, they will zig zag while in motion. There are many of us that have seen the "lights" in the sky but none of us know what they are, maybe you have heard something or seen something on the internet, I cannot find anything other than descriptions of UFOs, this is not shaped like those are described, it just seems to be long with twinkling lights.
Sorry to bother you, don't know where to look on here. Thanks for your time.
I hadn't heard specifically of the North Carolina lights, sorry. But in general I'm aware of reports like this in many different places. It would be hard for me to comment, really, without actually seeing the lights; as observation of things in the sky goes, different people can interpret the same observed object or effect in different ways. I guess that all I can say with any certainty is that, in my lifetime, I've never observed anything in the sky that I wasn't able to identify or guess about as a "natural" object or phenomenon (natural in this case also pertaining to human-made objects).