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

MISIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS 207
and have odd lights on them. A shakily held camera makes the
object appear to move. I have seen quite a few TV shows showing
footage of a breathless videographer exclaiming how an object is
moving, when it’s obviously the unsteady hand of the person that
is moving the camera.
Worse, the camera itself distorts the image. A famous UFO
tape shows a faint dot that, as the camera zooms in, gets resolved
as a diamond-shaped craft. Actually, the diamond shape was due
to the internal mechanisms of the camera, and when the videographer
zoomed in the object took this shape because it was out of
focus.
Modern electronic cameras have all sorts of odd defects that
can distort images in unfamiliar ways. Another famous series of
shots shows UFOs that are very bright with a very dark spot trailing
them. UFO believers claim that this is due to some sort of
space drive using new physics we don’t understand. Actually, this
is more likely an effect in the camera’s electronics. A bright object
can cause a dark spot to appear next to it in the camera’s detector
due to the way the image is generated. I have seen similar effects
in Hubble Space Telescope images.
My point is, don’t attribute to spaceships what you can attribute
to yourself or your equipment.
On the pseudodocumentary TV show Sightings, which gullibly
and unskeptically presents all manner of pseudoscience as fact, I
saw a segment in which a photographer claims that hundreds of
UFOs can be seen all the time. He puts his camera directly underneath
an awning and points it to just below the Sun. The awning
shades the Sun just enough to put the camera in shadow. He then
turns it on, and voilà! You can see dozens of airborne objects flitting
this way and that. He calls this method the “solar obliteration”
technique, and says that without it we would never see the
flying objects.
The photographer claimed that these were UFOs. I was amazed;
he had nothing on tape but fluff blowing in the wind. He didn’t
bother performing even the simplest of tests to try to find out what
these things were. If they were cottonwood seeds, for example (which
is what they look like to me), a fan blowing near his camera might