I´m airline pilot with 16 years of professional experience, I spent my first 3 to 4 years as a pilot looking outside to see if I could see a UFO.
Of course I didn't see anything strange. But I am routinely fouled by Venus. I've observed Venus at dawn thousands of times, but now and then it seems that there is a light following us. I look at it thinking it's another airplane, then when I can't identify it as such, I remember that I´m looking at Venus. It's fun it happens after so many years knowing the phenomenon.
When I was a kid I used to live in the country, not far from the airport (my father was a commercial pilot too). It was common to see airliners doing a visual landing traffic to land, passing just overhead. One afternoon, I was coming out to feed the dogs when I saw a very bright green light, just the same type of green that shines at the right wing of airplanes, but this light's trajectory was 90º to the normal traffic one, and was heading away from the airport. At first I thought It was a crashing airplane, but it was completely silent.
It was very weird, I stared at it for a minute or so, till it disappeared to the East. I thought then that it was a hight (and heavy) meteorite composed of Cu.
Next day the local newspaper talked about it, how everybody reported it to the police, and how it was in fact a meteorite that brushed the higher atmosphere and rebounded again to the space.
If you are expecting or believing in alien UFOs, it´s easy to mistake something like this for a real UFO.
I read some time ago this report http://www.amazon.com/Conclusions-Controlled-UFO-Hoaxes-Inst...
It's about a couple of guys that join a UFO sighting group, and start doing fake UFOs with helium balloons and a flash to see how they responded to it (spoiler: not very accurately or sceptical). Highly recommended.
When I was a kid I used to live in the country, not far from the airport (my father was a commercial pilot too). It was common to see airliners doing a visual landing traffic to land, passing just overhead. One afternoon, I was coming out to feed the dogs when I saw a very bright green light, just the same type of green that shines at the right wing of airplanes, but this light's trajectory was 90º to the normal traffic one, and was heading away from the airport. At first I thought It was a crashing airplane, but it was completely silent. It was very weird, I stared at it for a minute or so, till it disappeared to the East. I thought then that it was a hight (and heavy) meteorite composed of Cu. Next day the local newspaper talked about it, how everybody reported it to the police, and how it was in fact a meteorite that brushed the higher atmosphere and rebounded again to the space.
If you are expecting or believing in alien UFOs, it´s easy to mistake something like this for a real UFO. I read some time ago this report http://www.amazon.com/Conclusions-Controlled-UFO-Hoaxes-Inst... It's about a couple of guys that join a UFO sighting group, and start doing fake UFOs with helium balloons and a flash to see how they responded to it (spoiler: not very accurately or sceptical). Highly recommended.