It’s pretty clear that most eyewitness accounts of observations with ordinary explanations is correct. What we are left with is a tiny minority of people who observed an ordinary event and concluded that it was an extraordinary event.
A tiny percentage of witnesses, multiplied by the large population and large number of ordinary events, yields a number roughly consistent with the numbers experienced.
Lights in a triangular formation is pretty typical for aircraft; each type has several different possible configurations of light, and almost all of them involve three or more lights that aren’t in a line. Without anything to create perspective, it is basically impossible to tell the distance of an aircraft by eye even in the day (experienced people can identify the type, know the size, and do the trig to convert degrees of arc or elevation and altitude to distance, but those people typically recognize aircraft lights as aircraft lights).
Three lights in a triangular formation, perceived as distant and far apart and with no audible noise, is roughly what one would expect to experience if a Cessna Caravan was making a nonstandard approach to a nearby airport. If the airport lacks an operating control tower (like most municipal airports in the middle of the night), it is reasonable that air traffic never communicated with the aircraft. Further, it is perfectly legal for such an aircraft to fly without an installed transponder, meaning that the radar track (if observed) will show something there that cannot be proven to be an aircraft.
Think you don’t have a municipal airport near a given witness? The US has about 13179 public and private use airfields, roughly one for every 300 square miles.
It’s pretty clear that most eyewitness accounts of observations with ordinary explanations is correct. What we are left with is a tiny minority of people who observed an ordinary event and concluded that it was an extraordinary event.
A tiny percentage of witnesses, multiplied by the large population and large number of ordinary events, yields a number roughly consistent with the numbers experienced.
Lights in a triangular formation is pretty typical for aircraft; each type has several different possible configurations of light, and almost all of them involve three or more lights that aren’t in a line. Without anything to create perspective, it is basically impossible to tell the distance of an aircraft by eye even in the day (experienced people can identify the type, know the size, and do the trig to convert degrees of arc or elevation and altitude to distance, but those people typically recognize aircraft lights as aircraft lights).
Three lights in a triangular formation, perceived as distant and far apart and with no audible noise, is roughly what one would expect to experience if a Cessna Caravan was making a nonstandard approach to a nearby airport. If the airport lacks an operating control tower (like most municipal airports in the middle of the night), it is reasonable that air traffic never communicated with the aircraft. Further, it is perfectly legal for such an aircraft to fly without an installed transponder, meaning that the radar track (if observed) will show something there that cannot be proven to be an aircraft.
Think you don’t have a municipal airport near a given witness? The US has about 13179 public and private use airfields, roughly one for every 300 square miles.