Top 10 Most Common Explanations for UFOs

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5. Satellites



As the demand for improved communications, weather forecasting and aerial surveillance grows, the orbital lanes around our planet are growing increasingly cluttered with a wide array of fast moving and highly reflective satellites of all sizes and configurations. To give you some idea of how cluttered our skies are getting, the United States Space Surveillance Network (SSN) currently tracks more than 8,000 man-made objects orbiting the planet, of which about seven percent (approximately 560) are operational satellites. Often trapped in their orbits for years at a time, these silent sentinels of the skies can usually be picked out by anyone with a pair of binoculars and some patience, so they are not an uncommon sight. However, as they can often appear to pulsate in intensity (a natural illusion created by atmospheric inversion layers) and even “wink out” when their angle to the sun changes, they doubtlessly account for at least some of the many thousands of UFO sightings made over the years.

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4. Flares







Military aircraft often drop flares while conducting night training operations (or, in combat areas, as a means of diverting heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles). These flares, unlike the tiny ones used to mark highway obstacles or for emergency use, are quite large and will burn brightly for up to a half an hour at a time and, when suspended from parachutes, can remain airborne for some time. As such, if dropped in a cluster, they can take on a beaded necklace effect that gives them the impression of either aircraft hovering in formation or, if close enough together, can even appear to be a string of running lights or “portholes”. To a public generally unfamiliar with such ordnance and its characteristics, the effect can be spectacular and even frightening, making flares an especially good candidate to be mistaken for a UFO. This, in fact, may be the explanation behind the mysterious lights that were seen hanging over Phoenix, Arizona in 1997 (which does, in fact, lie near a military training ground where evening bombing exercises are frequently held.)

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3. Birds, Lens Flare, Reflections, and Other Abnormalities





Few people can accept the possibility that something as seemingly commonplace as a bird could be mistaken for a UFO, but it must be realized that under certain circumstances—for example, when flying at very high altitudes (some birds have been spotted flying as high as 40,000 feet or more)—birds can be highly reflective and, when wet, even appear to glisten like metal, giving them an “artificial” or metallic appearance. Additionally, bits of tin foil or panels of corrugated metal driven skyward by high winds and strong updrafts, falling chunks of ice broken off from a high altitude airliner, and other bits of aerial flotsam can also take on a silvery sheen and appear quite luminescent, making them occasional candidates for flying disks. Even ****pit lights reflecting off a canopy have been misidentified as high-speed UFOs (especially in the early years of UFO pursuits)

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2. Aircraft







While it is difficult to imagine that anyone could mistake a modern airliner or military jet for an extraterrestrial vehicle, there are circumstances when an aircraft can appear quite unusual, particularly to a highly excitable observer. For example, anyone who has ever seen a jet’s landing lights diffused by thick fog (or suddenly turned off during a steep ascent, making the aircraft appear to abruptly vanish) could easily imagine they are witnessing something otherworldly. Additionally, an aircraft flying through thick clouds on a dark and windy night (when the sound of engines is often masked) could easily appear as a mysterious, bright object winking on and off and changing brightness as it moves silently through the darkness. It can be problematic to identify a mysterious object in the sky as an aircraft during the daytime as well. For example, the brushed aluminum fuselage and wings of an aircraft can give off an eerie sheen at high altitudes on a bright and sunny day. This characteristic, when combined with the fact that most aircraft’s navigation lights are invisible in daytime and engine noise is often indiscernible from that height, can make it appear to be a mysterious, silvery object moving swiftly across the sky. Also, if seen straight on, an aircraft can appear to be hanging motionless, at least until it makes a sudden turn, thereby mimicking the sudden stops and start movement often associated with UFOs and further enhancing its otherworldly effect.


While a fixed wing aircraft are less likely to be misinterpreted as a UFO by a growingly savvy flying public today, they were undoubtedly the cause of many early UFO reports when aircraft were less common and, as such, more “unusual”. Blimps, helicopters, and VTOL aircraft (fixed wing planes capable of hovering) are also frequently mistaken as UFOs due to their unconventional flight characteristics—in particular their ability to hover and then suddenly fly away. Normally, one has only to watch these vehicles for a few minutes to ascertain their true identity but the highly excitable witness may never take those few minutes before deciding they are seeing an alien spacecraft.

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1. Experimental Military Aircraft







If regular aircraft can be a source for confusion, it makes sense that unusual looking experimental aircraft should be even more prone to being misidentified as a UFO, especially considering the vast array of often unusual or, at very least, unconventional designs being introduced. In fact, this hypothesis was very popular during the early years of ufology, when it was widely assumed—even by our own government—that the strange vehicles seen in the skies were either test-flights of captured Nazi aircraft or new and exotic Soviet vehicles capable of penetrating our airspace with impunity. In fact, the Air Force’s first official attempt to investigate UFOs—Project Sign—worked from the premise that UFOs were such weapons, thus necessitating both the urgency and the secrecy under which Sign operated.


However, considering how rare such craft are, the fact that they are usually flown only over restricted areas well away from public viewing, and that their flight characteristics are not usually all that far removed from traditional aircraft, it’s difficult to see how these would account for more than a tiny percentage of all reports. As such, it’s a near certainty that the unusual craft you see doing right angle turns, darting at incredible speeds across the sky, and changing color and intensity is not one of ours (or anyone else’s, for that matter).