Shedding Some Light on the Houston UFO Sighting

[Christopher O'Brien]

[Kudos to Greg over at Dailygrail.com. His simple analysis and small amount of effort to look into this viral story potentially helps bring people toward a more truthful explanation for the claimed event than "ETs" visiting the Johnson Space Flight Center —chris]

"The big UFO news over the past few days has been a supposed mass sighting of unidentified object hovering over Houston Texas, with the image above being one of the most publicized photos of a few doing the rounds. A search of Twitter shows that over the past day or two this has become a hugely popular story… Could a UFO have visited Texas this week?

"Several people have taken it to Twitter to post pictures showing a strange object floating through the Houston clouds during a storm last Monday.

"Some of the pictures show a bright oval object hovering. An unrelated picture shows a similar object through clouds. There are others, some showing what appears to be lights underneath the 'thing.' Here's a local news report from immediately after the 'sighting' (August 12):

"My thoughts: originally on seeing the most popular photos, I wondered why some of the photos show a very stormy night, while others show what appears to be a very clear night. After that, I dug into Twitter a bit to try and find the origins of the most popular photos - and, rather than finding "several people", the two most popular seem to have originated with the same person, one Nathaniel Xavier (@djnayyz) - photo 1, and photo 2. (Note: in a later tweet @djnayyz then said "I never took that picture I just posted it", though he has not yet answered commenters asking about the actual origin. He also seems happy to take the national media attention that's come along with his 'reposts'). Is that ball lightning? Or is it just an old favorite CG 'UFO' video effect?

"Returning to the photos however, there seems to be a fairly simple explanation: the 'UFO' is just the reflection of a highway light pole in the car window (a common source for UFO misidentification). See the image below for comparison, and note the number of lights on the UFO:

REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE:

 

[Wade]

@first I was thinking "how could one little light standard fool a number of people into thinking it was a ufo on one night in particular being that these things have likely been erected for a number of years?" I would have thought this would have come up more recently. But watching the trajectory of the lights in that second video it did look for all the world like a reflected (and refracted) light source being left in the distance.

 

[E. L. Wisty]

I'm not surprised. Apart from the "too good to be true factor", it's very apparent from most of these pictures that the UFO is a ring of lights surrounding nothing at all - the clouds are clearly visible in the middle. I never thought it could possibly be a structured object because it doesn't make sense if you assume it is one, but I didn't comment because I genuinely had no idea what it was. The reflection theory isn't immediately obvious because I've never in my life seen a circular arrangement of street-lights like that, so presumably they're very rare outside the Houston area (though since I live in the UK, maybe I'm failing to spot something which is quite common across the pond). But anyway, full marks to Chris for a nice bit of detective work there!

 

[Pigsinzen]

Another one bites the dust...

 

[Charlie Prime]

Good work digging the truth out on this one.

..I've never in my life seen a circular arrangement of street-lights like that, so presumably they're very rare outside the Houston area

They are somewhat rare. Most of those light fixtures have about 6 lamps. That one has 12.

Here are some on the Gulf Freeway (Interstate 45) that connects Houston to Galveston Island...

Google Maps

 

[boomerang]

We have the same type of freeway lighting fixtures here. I've actually wondered how long it might take someone out there to either mistake or knowingly claim one as a UFO.

 

[Randall]

Kudos to Greg over at Dailygrail.com. His simple analysis and small amount of effort to look into this viral story potentially helps bring people toward a more truthful explanation for the claimed event than "ETs" visiting the Johnson Space Flight Center —chris ...

It was tagged as a streetlamp in the first video I saw about it, and windshield reflections are the obvious explanation ( also discussed here ). But what I like about this is that we're not seeing what the skeptics would have the rest of the public believe, and that is that all us so-called "true believers" instantly jump to the conclusion "OMG aliens!" every time someone suggests that something this mundane is a UFO. So absolutely I'm with Chris. Kudos to Greg at the Daily Grail and everyone who liked the posts that offered alternative mundane explanations. I wonder though. Would this make some skeptics happy? Or will they just ignore it while repeating their same old mantra?

 

[E. L. Wisty]

Speaking as a small-s skeptic (a proper Skeptic with a great big S being the likes of James Randi, a devious and vindictive individual I have no sympathy with whatsoever), I would like to say to ufology that yes, this kind of reasoning does indeed "make some skeptics happy".

As I said above, I wasn't particularly impressed by the photos because they clearly show a ring of lights surrounding nothing, or in some pictures, a tiny blob in the middle. This simply didn't make sense in terms of any kind of spaceship, especially as it was well below cloud level and therefore not that big. Then again, since there seemed to be several independent pictures of the same thing, it couldn't be casually dismissed as a photoshop hoax. So my automatic response was to seriously doubt that it was a flying saucer, but not to jump to conclusions.

For the record, I thought it might have been a hoax involving a flimsy lightweight array of lights attached to a quadcopter, but I didn't say so because, as casual hoaxes go, especially when the hoaxer isn't sure if anybody will spot it and take a photo, that seemed just a little bit too complicated. And for me to jump to that somewhat contrived conclusion would have been a defense mechanism against my being wrong.

As it happens, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation, which I as a skeptic (small s, remember) didn't figure out because it involved an extremely unusual configuration of streetlights I'd never personally seen. If I'd been a fanatic, I would have jumped right in with the "circular array of lamps attached to a quadcopter" theory just because, however improbable it may be, it's preferable to the unacceptable notion of space-aliens.

Except that it isn't. A true skeptic doesn't dismiss anything just because he or she doesn't like it. That's the trouble with reality - it keeps on happening in the same old way whether we like it or not. And that applies to both sides of the argument.

 

[Wade]

I wonder how long it will be before a doctored version of this video ends up on the site that shall not be named ?

 

[Randall]

Speaking as a small-s skeptic (a proper Skeptic with a great big S being the likes of James Randi, a devious and vindictive individual I have no sympathy with whatsoever), I would like to say to ufology that yes, this kind of reasoning does indeed "make some skeptics happy" ...

Thanks for your response. You mention James Randi. I don't now enough to judge him ( personally ) quite so harshly, but I did join the JREF forum and that was a really rough ride filled with personal attacks and cyberbullying that went all the way up to the admin level. Anyone who thinks I'm too harsh should spend a month or two over there to see what actual abuse is really like. Anyway, very glad to see you participating in the forum. I like to build bridges with constructive skeptics, and look forward to reading more of your posts in the future .

 

[Ufocurious]

Ufology
I saw this Brazilian video on how to spot hoaxes and errors on "UFO" photos. The guy is the one who works for our UFO magazine. I learned a lot. One of the errors is when people take a picture through the windshield, and lights from the car dashboard magically appear in the photh boy, you were on the spot here.
Thanks again

 

[E. L. Wisty]

Thanks, ufology! I spent some time on the forum you mention, in the naive belief that a small-s skeptic would be able to get along reasonably well with both camps. Not so, alas. I gave up when people started posting comments along the lines of "Why haven't the admins banned you yet?" My crime? Suggesting that the famous "Million Dollar Challenge" (now apparently discontinued) was counterproductive because the rules were so restrictive, and the attitude to potential claimants so negative, that under no circumstances whatsoever would a cynical fraud of the type they were trying to target because they could do real harm to vulnerable people ever apply. Not one person who has ever applied has gotten as far as the preliminary test prior to taking the actual test. The vast majority of them (and this fact is documented on the JREF website in great detail) are people of subnormal intelligence or who have obvious mental health issues. Which doesn't stop the officials of the JREF having a good laugh at them, including the lady who claimed, amongst many, many other things, to be able to make people wet their pants by telepathy.

What purpose does this serve? Yes, crazy people make crazy claims, and stupid people believe stupid things. It's also the case that sane, intelligent people sometimes believe things that aren't true. That doesn't make them bad people. Well, sometimes it does, but, unlike Randi, I don't think that being a Spiritualist is morally identical to being a Nazi. Perhaps that's overstating his position, but I've seen many examples of James Randi going out of his way to suggest, sometimes in ways that come very close to being libelous, that anybody who holds views contrary to himself is not just wrong in the sense of being mistaken, but actually evil. As an open-minded person, I've repeatedly seen Randi attack people who I perceive as being honestly mistaken - otherwise they wouldn't have been naive enough to be in the same room as him - and be as vicious as the law will allow.

That's not skepticism, that's just bigotry! Oh, and the other crime I committed on the JREF forum was daring to suggest that the term "woo" (Randi himself prefers "woo-woo") should never, ever be used by skeptics to describe belief-systems they disagree with, because when you stoop to inventing childishly insulting playground-bully names for your opponents, you deserve to lose the argument, even if you're right.

I was not actually banned, since I announced in a dignified manner that the argument wasn't worth pursuing, therefore I was permanently leaving the forum, and I never went back. Though in fact, I might have been banned for saying that, but I've never bothered to log in since, so it will forever remain a mystery.

My point is, speaking as a skeptic (though not a Skeptic), I have nothing in common with those people at all. Whatever anybody out there wants to believe, it's OK by me, so long as you don't impose your beliefs on anybody else against their will. Especially me. And finding individuals within a particular belief-system who are obviously crazy and then using them to make the whole thing seem ridiculous is a cheap tactic at best, unless we're talking about a small and self-contained belief-system which revolves around one self-proclaimed guru who is clearly several wheels short of the full unicycle.

Believe me, I do not take these matters lightly. I've seen first-hand how a person who I won't name, but whom I genuinely think to be sane, intelligent, and absolutely honest as far as he knows how to be, has had his life turned upside down by the revelation that he has been abducted by aliens. This information came from one of the most spectacularly inept and blatantly attention-seeking amateur hypnotists I've ever encountered, in the wake of a genuinely peculiar event which, after all these years, will never now be investigated properly.

You'd definitely know the case if I gave you a name, but I'm not going to. Early hypnotic regressions revealed downright surreal material which I realized was absolutely identical to a scene in the original series of Star Trek, with Grays substituted for whatever those aliens were in the TV show, but nobody else seemed to notice. The person I'm talking about recently refused to sign a document allowing his alleged experiences to be made into a movie starring a major Hollywood actor as himself, despite the financial incentive, because he's absolutely sick to death of the whole thing.

What I'm saying is, there may or may not be be anything behind any particular paranormal claim, but once anybody with a strong belief-system gets too involved, the waters are forever muddied. I truly believe that we need more small-s skeptics who are willing to be genuinely open-minded, and just say: "OK, so what happened here?"

 

[Randall]

...What I'm saying is, there may or may not be be anything behind any particular paranormal claim, but once anybody with a strong belief-system gets too involved, the waters are forever muddied. I truly believe that we need more small-s skeptics who are willing to be genuinely open-minded, and just say: "OK, so what happened here?"

Great attitude! And thanks for sharing your experience about the JREF forum. I don't think you'll run into anything like that over here. Although I should mention that you may hear the word "woo" once in a while. I personally have very little tolerance for most New Age nonsense e.g. Quantum Mysticism, The Secret, or other movements that promote similar so-called "spiritual" powers. Plus I don't take religion seriously other than in the context of the real-life impact it has on society, which cannot be ignored, and for the most part I think we'd be better off without. If I didn't personally believe alien visitation is a reality and that strange unexplained things actually do happen, I'd probably be welcomed into the skeptical community. But I'm not going to change my beliefs just to fit into a social group.

 

[manxman]

The jref forum is run by shit-house's for shit-house's, just a lil bit of trivia for ye.

 

[rosered44]

I have captured an unexplained object high up over Down Town Houston on 5/23 at 8:44pm. I have seen others around the world capture the same object how ever some people dismiss it as a reflection of a circular lamp post. In my pictures that were taken outside with no windows or glass to reflect anything also show movement of the object while I stood still in the same spot taken 4 photos in less then a minute. I also saw the object thinking it was a plane. If you look close you will see 2 objects in two of the photos. Here is the link to my photo's:

http://i59.tinypic.com/118no09.jpg
http://i59.tinypic.com/1zvm94.jpg
http://i60.tinypic.com/qx3wpv.jpg
http://i61.tinypic.com/35cfwvq.jpg
http://i60.tinypic.com/33blo5z.jpg
http://i61.tinypic.com/2egee1h.jpg
http://i60.tinypic.com/11bhm51.jpg