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.