Questions about UFOs may be unanswerable, but on the chance you may be even better connected than I thought, here goes. Why are UFO sightings always at night? And why do they seem to appear mostly to stranded motorists or farmers in the middle of Montana or Kansas? Are our friends from afar allergic to light or do they just prefer the late night specials at Denny’s? And what is it with their ships? They always seem to be illuminated in colorful lights that either impair the victim’s vision or provide him with an incredible light show. Do our space visitors have some arrangement to buy out the contents of defunct discos? –Eleanor Tubbs, San Antonio, Texas
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I detect a certain lack of reverence here, Eleanor, which is typical of the younger generation. Whatever happened to the paranoia that made this country great? Actually, UFO sightings aren’t always at night, and they aren’t always in rural areas. They do tend to involve suspiciously few witnesses, however.
The moral of this story, of course, is that jealous phenomena almost always turn out to be illusions or hoaxes. In the case of UFOs it’s easy to see how this happens. The typical sighting occurs at night, when you can readily mistake a planet, satellite, aircraft, etc, for an alien visitor. (The planet Venus, which is quite bright, is notorious in this regard.) Adding to the illusion is the fact that our ability to gauge the size and distance of airborne objects is laughably poor. (Example: When asked to judge the size of the image of the moon in the sky, most people say it’s about the size of a dinner plate. In reality it’s smaller than the nail on your little finger held at arm’s length.) Another factor is the natural human tendency to “fill in” (i.e., make up) missing details when we get a hasty glimpse at something. This is often what accounts for reports of blinking and/or colored lights, spacecraft windows with aliens visible inside, and so on.
