Hacker News Reader

Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know what I saw but they were not weather balloons, satellites, planes, planets, stars, or meteors.

If you don't know what they were then you can't rule out these other things.

That’s a bit like saying if I can’t identify a bird I can’t be sure it’s not an ostrich, even if it’s in a tree and flies away. The things in that list have certain properties which can allow them to be ruled out when trying to identify a UFO. Whether that was possible with the information in this particular case and was done correctly might be up for debate, but it is certainly possible to do so in the general sense.

That's absolutely untrue. If you show me a picture of an unfamiliar machine, I might not know what it is, but I can tell you definitely that it's not, say, a walrus.

I used an astronomy app on my phone to verify the satellites, planets, stars, meteors part.

They moved around in a non-linear fashion at will, they were intelligently operated. One of them disappeared in a flash...

Things disappear at night when they turn their lights off. It’s common to confuse it with extreme speeds, but I am not sure why.

PS: One of the strangest things I saw in the nights sky tuned out to be one of these: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5J52MLXXUy4 My perspective of how large and fast it was ended up being completely wrong.

How do you know they were intelligently operated?

What organic phenomenon moves around like that? is what we asked ourselves.

One of the people with me was from Columbia University and he is as 'rational' as they come, even he was baffled...

Next time you see it, break out your phone or camera and capture a video. Then we can discuss the actual video!

One of the biggest causes of this type of sighting is misinterpreting perspective. It's very hard to tell how far away something is in the sky, especially at night. Something that looks close may be far and vice versa. When you think something is a different distance away than it is it can appear to act in unexpected ways, leading to misunderstanding what it is.

Cool, does it tell you when and where you'll be able to see a meteor, or does it keep a record of what meteors fell and where?

Of course you can if you know enough to identify those things. If you had never seen a helicopter before you could still differentiate it from a fixed-wing aeroplane.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com