Call me a big skeptic on this one. People see all sorts of things once they start looking at the sky. Once reporting like this gets started, everyone starts seeing things they think are new.
The Navy apparently once fired hundreds of rounds at Venus. They missed. It was still there, and continues to be mistaken for a UFO, probably more frequently than anything else in the sky. The Navy story may be apocryphal, since there have been a few different versions over the years, but the phenomenon of misidentifying aerial objects is very real.
We had a wee bout of UFO hysteria in Missouri in 1973. A lake near the town of Piedmont became the locus of a large number of UFO sightings. The vehicles were supposedly hiding in the lake, and would take flight at night, returning before morning. Many “UFO researchers” descended on the area, but nothing substantial was ever found. But they do now have an annual UFO festival, for what that’s worth.
In pilot training, you learn quite a bit about the limitations of your own vision, especially at night. The human eye and brain are not well-adapted for darkness. Much of what we see is put into perspective by other things around it. In darkness you lose that perspective. You can’t tell whether a light, or cluster of lights, is near, or far. Lights that are close and bright can appear quite distant in poor visibility. Very distant lights can appear close when visibility is excellent. Cold air is often very clear air, and visibility can extend for many miles. Obstruction lighting for tall buildings and towers, and position lighting for other aircraft can be visible for more than 25 miles.
Tricks our vision can play on us include making those distant objects appearing to be stationary, hovering nearby. Silently. It is more likely that they are many miles off, perhaps so distant that you cannot perceive movement, or possibly on a course directly toward or away from you. UFO reports often include hovering objects, silent and close. At night. That’s a red flag.
Aircraft position lights are red on the left, green on the right, a white light visible from the rear, a rotating red beacon, and possibly flashing white strobes. Landing lights, used only in the takeoff and landing phases of flight are visible mostly from the front angles and are very bright. When landing lights are switched off, the illusion of an object accelerating away at great speed is created. That is also often part of a UFO report.
What were they seeing at Piedmont, with all those UFOs rising from, and descending into, the lake? Probably the effect of lights seen from a great distance. Aircraft at a distance appear low on the horizon. Moving away, they eventually meet the horizon and “descend into the lake.” Coming toward you, they arise from the horizon and move higher in the sky as they become closer. Our eyes do not give us accurate distance information.
The reports from New Jersey really don’t make a lot of sense. We’ve heard of “drones” spotted, displaying the typical red, green, and white position lights. I’ve seen multiple reports where the observers contend that the lights were switched off once the craft was observed. It doesn’t make much sense to have the marker lights on to begin with if you don’t want to be seen. More likely, the line of sight to a distant aircraft fell below the tree line, or behind a cloud, obscuring those lights.
The objects reportedly don’t correlate with any FAA radar contacts. With the positions reported (i.e. hovering over nearby critical infrastructure) I wouldn’t expect that they would. But I bet there’s an aircraft on that line of sight, a couple dozen miles in the distance. The east coast corridor is extremely busy.
I find the suggestions that Iran or China may be involved to be extremely improbable. Iran has bigger fish to fry right now than observing New Jersey. China certainly surveils us. Their programs include drones, but probably don’t include large numbers of drones, sporting position lights, concentrated over New Jersey.
I heard this morning that the local citizenry and police are threatening to shoot these drones down. They don’t believe the Biden administration is doing enough, or disclosing enough, relative to this threat. I wish the locals good luck with that. They’ll have the same success as the Navy did when firing on Venus, although I fear they’ll kill someone in the process. “Constitutional Sheriffs” organizing a posse to shoot down suspected Iranian drones using AR-15s sounds like a recipe for disaster.
This will all likely pass in the coming weeks, and people will stop looking at the sky. That’s a shame, because there are a lot of good things to see up there, if you can look with a little less paranoia.
