This is more of a story then a conspiracy explaining something that might cause someone to think they saw a UFO.

Tonight, my wife and I had a friend over for dinner. While we were all talking, kids where playing a game called Rock Band. In this game you have a bunch of colors that move from the top of the screen to the bottom, sometimes at a very rapid pace. After watching this for an hour or so, my wife and I decided to step outside for a breather. Directly south of me is Jupiter, pretty high in the sky (not too high, but you get the point). I wasnt paying alot of attention to it, but every once in a while I get the urge to look up. As I stared at it, it looked like it was moving back and forth and up and down, sorta gyrating in space. My wife was outside with me and saw the same thing. Then, after a few minutes, she perks up, "Hey, that just Jupiter". At that point I feel incredibly stupid, realizing the student had bested the teacher.

Point of the story. Strange bright lights in the sky can be affected by not so strange things. It just a matter of perception and how your brain interprets that information.

The UFO I saw was in broad daylight...no lights.

No evidence of aliens, either. But it was absolutely not a light. I could even sketch it, although I still wouldn't know what it was.

Daylight or in darkness - the human eye-to-brain path is full of things that can make anything turn itself into a UFO or 'alien craft' in your head. Most light sources: i.e. blinking lights in a dark sky - tend to move in odd ways due to frame of reference issues and the eye's constant subtle movements. Most daytime issues are from perspective and size misidentification.

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---"Why do things have to suck so bad?" a friend once asked me.
"Because space is a vacuum and that's a lot of suck." I replied.
(Actual quote)---

It wasn't a light source; I could see details on it. I have no doubt your explanation is correct in many cases...I am merely pointing out that it is an ineffective catch-all.

Channelized attention, semi hypnogogic state, suggestibility....ie: everybody knows that featureless UFO's are passe....They have to be structured.....Aliens have to follow the paradigm, no deviation allowed, just like the supposed "craft".....

A famous abduction researcher, now deceased, would not even examine any abduction tale that did not fit his paradigm....He said this on C2C years ago, even Art thought it was odd....
I ran into this on a radio show years ago....The Researcher would only examine a case if it fit a certain pattern, he casually dismissed all the non-alien, non "current model" UFO sightings as hallucinations.....

Dale

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"Ad astra per aspera"

What kind of details could you see?

The sky is FULL of many things. From stars to planets to sundogs to flares, blimps, balloons... There are so very many different things that a person can see up in the sky moving around.
Even birds.
If it isn't recognized for what it is, it will be recognized for whatever the mind wants it to be.

So the details you saw- may be a clue as to what it was.

Get real, it was obviously an alien spacecraft, anyone can see that . . . next!

There's no such thing as an effective "catch all" for explaining UFO sightings. That's like saying that wet roads are an ineffective catch-all for motor vehicle accidents--it's the cause of some, but each accident is caused by a seperate set of conditions.

But I believe he was responding to the OP's post.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

I think that was my point.

Neverfly, to answer question, the details I saw were merely shadows and lines, that sort of thing...nothing I could identify. But enough eliminate it as a light source.

I am open to the hallucination explanation, but, if so, I was not under the influence of any alcohol or narcotic, and it is the only time it has happened in my life. It was approximately 3:00PM and the sun was behind a mountain.

And, to repeat for Joe Boy's benefit (I shouldn't have to), I have no evidence whatsoever that it was an alien spacecraft. If I did, it would be identified. I am not making that claim.

One thing that I've had happen is I'll see something breifly look somewhere else, then it'll register that the first thing I saw was at the second place I looked. Sounds confusing, so here's an example:

I notice a can of coke sitting on the coffee table, then glipse out the window, then back at the tv. Then a minute later I'll think "Wait, why is there a can of coke on the windowsill?"

But it's not there. The two images are just mixed-up in processing.

Again, not saying that's what happened in your case--but it's something the can contribute to mis-sightings of things.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

My misinterpreting something is definitely the most likely explanation. However, I watched whatever it was move very slowly for 2 or 3 minutes, then is suddenly shot out like it sat on a tack.

Helicopter? Maybe, but I heard no sound. Plus, it seemed to accelerate much too quickly.

Airplane/jet? Maybe, but it was moving much too slowly at the start.

I dunno...I agree 100% that misinterpretation is the most likely explanation. Although like anyone who witnesses anything from a UFO to a traffic accident, that explanation doesn't seem correct to me. Doesn't mean it isn't correct, though. After all this time, I just pretty much accept that I am never going to know exactly what I saw.

I'm impressed to hear it put that way. I have a form of visual epilepsy that makes me see odd things... it is most often triggered by driving past trees with sunlight passing through them and then blinking at just the right time. I can't really explain the effect but its a bit like an image from a few minutes ago is frozen in my field of vision for a second. Very disconcerting. (I also have a device I call an LSD machine that flickers very bright light quickly - it too has this effect if I blink)

I'm not saying that is what happened to you at all - I'm saying that I've seen some pretty odd things as well but that most of mine is from my brain being weird. (I won't get into the outright hallucinations I have when I'm extremely tired or have the flu)

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---"Why do things have to suck so bad?" a friend once asked me.
"Because space is a vacuum and that's a lot of suck." I replied.
(Actual quote)---

The frustraiting part is many times, there's just simply no way to gather enough data to ever answer what was seen. If it was misinterpretation of visual ques, then there may simply have been nothing there -- but, like the invisible gnome, how do you prove nothing was there? So that's an avenue with an impossible to prove solution.

If there was something there--which sounds just as likely--evidence of what it was may not exist. If possible you can try to obtain radar records or air traffic data. But that may not answer the question. The object obviously isn't still there, so you can't exactly go back and study it further. You can search for a phenomenon, craft, etc that seems to match what you saw--but even that's not proof of anything, just helps determin a liklihood.

It's frustraiting, but the point is there's not always a way to answer the question. The part that gets to most of us here at BAUT is when people take that inherant inability to answer the question, and try to say that's proof of alien craft (and no, I'm not saying that's what you do. Refrestingly, you admit that you simply don't know what it was, and entertain all possibilities).

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

That is very interesting...and it may well have been something like that. The only thing that makes me doubt it is that it never happened again. On the other hand, maybe it just hasn't happened again yet.

Fazor: Thanks for the compliment...I appreciate that very much. IIRC, I actually did read an article in the paper around that time that claimed Norton Air Force Base tracked something unusual flying over the local mountains. While I remember the article, I don't recall if the writer provided any real documentation for that...I seem to recall "unnamed sources" or some such. Nothing I could take seriously. I wonder if it would be possible to access the records after all these years?

To be honest, the incident did shake me up a bit at the time, for about 2 weeks or so. Then my brain sort of dead letter filed it under the weird-things-that-have-happened-to-me-in-my-life file.

I think we do a great disservice to UFO witnesses when we imply that one prosaic explanation must explain them all.

Now granted many UFO enthusiasts want to consider all UFO sightings as potentially all alien spacecraft. And this leads them sometimes to respond to skepticism by saying, "Well then what one prosaic can possibly lead to all these occurrences?" This is because they want to make it hard to explain the sightings prosaically.

Even when we say that the vast majority of sightings are likely to be misidentification of ordinary phenomena, that casts a huge net. There are innumerable ordinary phenomena, and innumerable ways in which they can be misinterpreted by mentally healthy, well-educated, ordinary people. True hallucination is almost unheard of. But misperception is very common.

As has been said before, we don't always get a good look at things. But the brain needs a coherent story. It has to have a consistent concept onto which it can hang what we did see and hear. So it happily invents a framework if one doesn't immediately present itself. We "see" and "remember" things that may not have been exactly as they were presented to us. It's vital to understand that this is not mental illness or hallucination. This is simply the way everyone's brain works.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Yep.

I will admit, though, finding evidence that it was an alien spacecraft would have been sooooo cool! But I didn't, and I consider that one of the more unlikely explanations (in fact, way down on the list just above a plane piloted by Rocky and Bullwinkle. Which would also be very cool, btw).

Something similar happened to my wife about 10 years ago. Was a sunny summer afternoon and she was standing together with a friend of her's in front of our house. They called me, buzzing with excitement, but I was too slow and I only saw a tiny black spot in the sky that quickly disappeared and could have been anything.

In the first one or two weeks after the "sighting" she was quite disturbed and talked to quite a few people - well, as you may have guessed, those "conversations" were quite frustrating, to say the least:

Must have been a helicopter! - no, there was no sound ... must have been a ballon! - no, it moved to quick... then people became more and more offending. The hardest part for me during this phase was when she desperately looked at me for help, or reassurement, or whatever, and i didn't know what to say.

She got tons of silly "explanations", more or less malicious jokes, ... well, I'm sure you can imagine. Now she mentions this episode about once or twice a year, but only to close friends.

We will never know what she saw, but for sure there live "debunkers" on earth that behave like (won't violate the forum rules) - and for the record: I'm talking here about people I've personally met - not about posters to this thread. (Btw., I categorize myself as skeptic).

I am very sympathetic to your wife. In the last few hours, I have discussed this on this board more than I have the previous 2 decades. For the very same reasons you just mentioned.

So it must have been aliens!!!

This is utter nonsense!

So you don't know what you saw- that's HARDLY disturbing unless you choose to make it so.

I can't count on both hands all the unknowns I have seen in my life.

Once, a friend called me on the phone talking about seeing a SILENT object in the sky that moved strangely and she could not figure out what the heck it was.
Her next door neighbor was outside on his side of the fence commenting on it to his family- equally baffled.
I went over there and looked

It was a Flock Of Birds!

Once I told her what it was and showed her how it was a flock of birds- she felt very silly.
I heard the neighbor on the otherside of the fence start laughing when he realized as he heard me too.

If you don't like that attitude people give Woo Woo Claims- perhaps you should think about your own attitude given during the delivery of the Woo Woo Claims.

People are NOT obliged to be sensitive to absurdity.

Let's be fair now, they could have been alien birds. Let's keep that mind open!!

Well it boggles my mind when people see something that is uncertain to them, they then attribute it to the Supernatural or Aliens- and then they get all upset when people look at them like they're goofy when they say something GOOFY.

We're so busy playing at being nice that we forget the people need Meanness to stay grounded in reality.

Those Mean O'l Debunkers! They have no idea what it's like to see a UFO...

Guess what? I've seen tons of them. And I haven't had a psychological disturbance yet.

Mean huh?? I think I like that . . .

A while back, a friend was showing me pictures she had taken of angels.

That's right- Angels.

She had gone outside for a cigarette and was thinking about angels. She had her camera with her and for whatever reason (Camera phone) decided to take pictures of the sky. She figured that if there was such things as angels, they might show up in the pictures.

Low and Behold, there were Smoky Images in the pictures.

She was showing them as proof that angels exist. She had been thinking about them and they revealed themselves to her.

After I, in my Mean and Horrible Insensitivity, pointed out that was cigarette smoke in the pictures, she got angry with me. Threw a ton of accusations at me and stopped talking to me for at least a couple months.

Here's what I saw. It's taken from a report I wrote immediately after the sighting:

It's been suggested it may have been ball lightning.

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"For ignorance to reign, all it takes is for knowledgable people to say nothing"

Lonewulf

That experience I had when I was a young teen would have really meant a heck of a lot more to me if I wouldn't have been alone. I have thought about who I would have liked there with me for many years. I have been around here for about a year and if I could choose who I would have wanted with me it would be you and Jay, hands down. I assure you it would have been a rich experience for all. Sometimes I feel cheated for not being able to share that in the physical realm. Not because you both are skeptics as in a "told you so" scenerio, but because of the clerity of thought you each exhibit. What a trip. Jay was the first person I ever told about that and I did it in a pm. If only it could be, man!

Speaking of ball lightning: when I was seventeen years old I experienced ball lightning from about twenty feet away for all of about 15 seconds. I did not realize what it was until I was in my twenties in college. I can describe it to a tee because it was right in front of my face with no distractions. I only later in life appreciated what a special and rare experience that was. It didn't seem all that remarkable to me at the time because it was just a few years prior that I experieneced that incident by the railroad tracks. Thinking back, it was pretty cool though.

I used to get nighterrors occasionally.
They could get pretty bad sometimes.
You are frozen to the bed, paralyzed. Add to that, for some reason, you cannot breathe. It feels like you're between waking and sleeping.
Often- my eyes were open and I could see the room.

During this, I would hear screaming and cursing. I could feel things poking me, prodding, taunting.

It was the epitome of feeling like I was being molested by demons.

I told someone about it and he said that the Devil wanted me back. That's why it was happening.

One particularly bad one, in desperation, I called out to Jesus to help me. I remember seeing light, then seeing a man bend over me and he said something to reassure me I was safe.
With that- the nighterror ended. I could move, breathe- I was fine.

I was alone in the room.

This is an unadulterated and True recollection. I remember it very clearly.
I remember how much I Believed after that too.

This is likely sleep paralysis. In 40 years I have experienced this precisely twice. It is a most odd phenomenon when it happens, but it is a purely internal mental occurrence.

Nonetheless to the one who experiences it, it is pretty trippy.

ETA: BTW the first time it happened I was a kid and boy was it way scary

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Very funny Scotty, now beam down my clothes.

Exactly.

BUT I was also honest in my recollection and telling.

I know that there were no demons. But many people- choose to believe that demons were involved.