Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

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PPPPPP
Misidentified Flying Objects:
UFOs and Illusions of the
Mind and Eye
O n
February 11, 1997, at approximately 3:00 A.M. local
time, I had a close encounter with a UFO. Actually, multiple
UFOs.
I was in Florida with my family to attend a Space Shuttle launch.
I had been working at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland
for nearly two years, helping to calibrate a new camera that was to
be placed on board the Hubble Space Telescope. All of us who had
worked on the camera got passes to see the Shuttle launch in Florida,
and we were all excited about seeing our camera lofted into
space.
The launch was scheduled for 3:55 a.m. That’s not the best
time to appreciate the spectacle and fury of rocket launch, but the
vagaries of orbital mechanics demanded such a liftoff. My mom
volunteered to baby-sit our infant daughter Zoe, so my father, my
wife, my nephew, and I made our way to Cape Canaveral around
1:00 a.m. We quickly found out that several thousand other people
were also attending. Too excited to nap, my father and I wandered
around talking to the other attendees. Many people had telescopes
set up to watch the distant shuttle, proudly standing under the intense
glare of multiple spotlights. To see it we had to peer across a
long stretch of the Banana River that separates the cape from main-
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