September 2018 – The Best UFO Sightings Of 2018 – Part 2 – SECTION 51

It’s not hard to understand why there are so many UFO sightings. After all, the only criterion for a UFO is that some “flying object” be “unidentified” by whoever is looking at it at the time. Any object seen in the sky, especially at night, can be very difficult to identify because of the limitations of human perception. Knowing how far away something is helps us determine its size and speed; that’s why we know that moving cars seen at a distance aren’t really smaller, nor are they moving slowly; it’s simply an optical illusion. If the eyewitness doesn’t know the distance, then he or she cannot determine the size. Is that thing or light in the sky 20 feet long and 200 yards away, or is it 200 feet long and a mile away? It’s impossible to know, and this makes estimates of size, distance and speed of UFOs very unreliable. Even the planet Venus — at least 25 million miles away — has been mistaken for a UFO by pilots and others on many occasions.

Psychologists also know that our brains tend to “fill in” missing information, which can mislead us. For example, many sightings of three lights in the night sky are reported as appearing as a triangular spacecraft. The fact is that any three lights in the sky, whether connected or not, will form a triangle if you assume (without evidence) that each of those lights are fixed at the ends of three points. Had a witness seen four lights he or she would have assumed it was a rectangular-shaped object in the night sky above him; our brains sometimes make connections where none exist.

All that is needed to create a UFO sighting is one person who may not recognize a light or object in the sky. But just because one person — or even several people — can’t immediately identify or explain something they see doesn’t mean that someone else with more training or experience (or even the same person seeing the same object from a different angle) may not instantly recognize it. While it’s possible that extraterrestrials in spacecraft exist and have visited Earth, the UFO sightings so far provide no real evidence. The lesson, as always, is that “unknown lights in the sky” is not the same as “extraterrestrial spacecraft”…