What is the origin of the “UFO” that is flooding the circle of friends?

Let’s learn about some common “UFOs”.

When various mysterious pictures or videos are circulated on the Internet or in the circle of friends, we can reveal the truth in one word.

Let’s first talk about the word UFO, which is the abbreviation of “Unidentified Flying Object”.

In fact, as long as it is a flying object and we don’t know what it is, we can call it an “UFO”.

So, seeing UFOs is a common thing, but it does not mean seeing aliens. In fact, we can say with confidence that UFOs have nothing to do with alien life.

If alien technology can really reach the level of teleportation, they can just swagger around in public. There is no need to hide from us mysteriously and only show up occasionally.

The most common UFOs are airplanes, especially those in the early morning or at dusk. Airplanes with two or four tails are often mistaken for meteors or comets.

Even if there is no contrail, the photographer will describe it like this: "It really is glowing by itself! It is glowing and rising straight up slowly!"

Why does this phenomenon occur?

This is because, in the early morning or at dusk, the sun cannot reach the lower atmosphere and the sky background appears very dark, but golden sunlight can be seen at high altitudes where the aircraft is located.

The plane and the contrail behind it, illuminated by a golden light, seemed to be glowing against the dark sky.

As for "straight up", it is actually the visual perception of the plane flying levelly towards the observer's head from a distance.

Lenticular clouds.

The shape of this type of cloud is particularly consistent with the image of "flying saucers" seen in science fiction movies, and it often appears in clusters or layers.

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Its most typical cause is that stable humid air flies over mountain tops or rugged mountains, the temperature drops suddenly, and it quickly condenses into clouds that last for a long time.

A weather or mapping airship.

Nowadays, people are unfamiliar with this kind of large balloon that is round, seems to have a structure, hovers for a long time and can move independently. In fact, before the invention of airplanes, humans traveled by airships. Later, after several accidents, they gradually withdrew from the stage of history.

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Musk's Starlink. This is a series of small satellites arranged in a team. When they pass through the sky, there is a feeling of a galactic railway.

Venus. As a planet, it often hides in the sun's brilliance for a long time. Once it appears, it is too bright to look like a real star and looks very artificial.

At dawn or dusk when there is no moon, it can even cast a shadow of a person on the ground. The Indian army once mistook it and Jupiter for drones released by China, and this blunder was featured in BBC News in July 2013.

The recognizable features of Venus are: first, as an inner planet, it should appear in the sky in the direction of the sun; second, it should be "stable", without flickering or obvious movement in the sky.

Sometimes you will see a UFO like this: it does not flicker, is very bright, and flies steadily in the air. It flies and flies, and suddenly disappears before it reaches the horizon. In this case, you have to consider a satellite or the International Space Station.

It simply disappeared because it flew into the shadow of the earth.

Sometimes, in the dawn or dusk, there is a winding, shining cloud.

This cloud is a noctilucent cloud that represents the trajectory of a rocket launch. This launch trajectory is actually slanted high in the sky, so even when it is dark on the ground, it can still be illuminated by the sun.

There is also a large smoky spherical bubble, which looks like the trajectory of a rocket launch and can be seen by people in several provinces.

This kind of bubble is also formed by launching a rocket. After the last stage of the rocket enters space and is shut down, the ejected fuel will spread evenly in all directions in the form of a spherical surface in a microgravity environment.

If a long-exposure photograph of the night sky shows a very straight line, and one or two bright spots appear regularly at intervals, then that is a plane flying at night.

We can even know that the one with one bright spot every other period is Boeing, and the one with two bright spots is Airbus, because Boeing flashes once each time, and Airbus flashes twice each time.

If you use a telephoto lens, you can see more light details, such as the photo below, which shows an Airbus flying over the Lyra constellation. The navigation lights on the wingtips are red on the left and green on the right, and the strobe lights flash twice each time.

Source: Internet

There is also a strange UFO. The photographer was taking a night scene photo and did not see anything strange when taking the photo, but some light spots appeared in the photo, sometimes they seemed to form a formation.

This kind of UFO is actually formed in the light path of a camera or mobile phone camera, which we call a "ghost".

Its typical feature is that the strange light spot is centrally symmetrical with the real strong light source in the photo.

For example, in this night view of Nanjing, every ghost in the sky can find its original owner on the ground, and all the connecting lines intersect at one point.

Source: Internet

There may also be many luminous objects appearing in the sky above cities or towns, such as swarms of insects illuminated by ground spotlights, flying birds or low-altitude clouds, as well as sky lanterns, luminous kites, drones, etc.

The appearance of these UFOs and how to identify them are just some questions for everyone to think about!

Author: Qu Jiong

Review｜Liu Yong, Researcher at the National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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