Paranormal Update 2015: Weather Vs. UFOs

A year ago, I gave a talk at a local Paranormal gathering about weather phenomena that are mistaken as UFOs. For this year's session, which I was unable to attend, I have updated my PowerPoint Presentation, which you can download at this link.

I gave this talk because I believe it's important for people reporting UFOs to realize there is a litany of other possible phenomena that can help identify them. The 2015 presentation outline below gives an idea of the subjects that I talk about in the PowerPoint:

Lenticular Clouds:

Often formed by air flowing over mountains. Because these clouds continually reform as air flows through them, they appear to "hover" and have a saucer shape.

Mothership Clouds:

Extremely severe thunderstorms take on a saucerlike shape before they drop high winds, hail and tornadoes.

Hole-punch (Fallstreak) Clouds:

Hole-punch clouds are formed when a jet (or jet vapor trail) goes through a deck of clouds, forcing them to “rain out.”

Lightning Sprites & Jets

Ball Lightning

St. Elmos Fire

Rocket & Missile Vapor Trails

Noctilucent Clouds

Noctilucent clouds are rare, extremely high clouds that refract light at dusk when the Sun has already set, illuminating the sky with seemingly no light source.

Lens & Light Reflections

Atmospheric Optics: Ice Halos:

Iridescence on ice halo clouds can appear above thunderstorms; partial halos (circumhorizontal arcs) can appear as rainbows in the sky. Bright spots or rainbows on either side of the sun are called “Sun Dogs” and are caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere reflecting the sun’s light.

Atmospheric Optics: Light Pillars:

Street lights reflecting off of ice crystals or ice fog can produce “Pillars” in the sky.

Non-Rain Objects Falling from Sky:

Tornadoes can sometimes pick up objects and “rain” them down. Some examples are:

FISH (Australia, 2010),
FROGS (Missouri, 1873),
COAL (England, 1983)

Cryometeors:

Airplanes often shed ice from their wings which hit the ground and are called “cryometeors”

Man-Made Objects: Weather Balloons

Man-Made Objects: Quadcopters

Man-Made Objects: Chinese Lanterns

“NASA Earth-Like Planets Study”: 100,000,000,000 Earth-like planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. 20,000,000,000,000,000 Earth-like planets in the Universe. I think life is likely out there, but there’s no concrete evidence YET.

Occam’s Razor: “A principle of economy, or succinctness used in problem-solving” “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.”

Which is more likely: One of these many known flying objects was mistaken for a UFO? --OR--
An extraterrestrial life-form has made a long journey to appear in our skies but leave no evidence?

So there are 70,000 UFO reports per year… Wild Estimate: 30,000 of them are probably atmospheric phenomena. Let’s say another 30,000 are known aircraft. Let’s assume another 9,999 are camera reflections.

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