I’m a little disappointed with the National UFO Reporting Center.
While, I suppose, they’re “job” is just to accept reports of UFOs, the fact that their database contains reports that are easily disproved doesn’t help the overall credibility of the database. What percentage of the reports are of a similar nature?
Let me demonstrate with my (honest to goodness) real UFO sighting in Phoenix, Arizona.
UFO Sighting Report
Date: September 17, 2004
Location: Phoenix, Arizona
Time: 5:30AM – 11:15AM
Between 5:30 and 6:00AM, on my way to work. It was still dark outside. I arrived at the QuickTrip on Indian School and noticed someone looking up at the sky. I turned and looked and to the north-north west there was a fiercely luminescent object in the sky. This was absolutely not the morning star; it was easily 4 times larger than any planet or star in the sky. It was round, but it wasn’t a perfect sphere, it had an indefinable inconsistency in its luminosity. It hovered motionless.
It was so brilliant in the sky that everyone was stopping to look at it, no one seemed to know what it could be. I text messaged my wife and a friend telling them to go outside and see if they could photograph it. Unfortunately, the camera my wife used was worthless and just got a speck in the sky.
I headed into work, and people were literally standing along the side of the road looking up at the object.
The object was so stationary, and so brilliant in the sky, my impression was that, perhaps we were witnessing a super-nova, similar to the 1006 CE super-nova near Beta Lupi, spotted in China, Japan and elsewhere.
Even after the sun came up, the object was still there, now a sort of pale whitish-grey, similar to the moon when it is out in the daylight.
Around 6:45 I got word back from my friend that he’d gotten good pictures and the object was identified: A weather balloon. (Ha! Project Blue Book was right!). Earlier in the morning, while it was still dark, it was high enough up that it was being hit by direct sunlight, creating the intense glow in the dark sky.
It remained hovering over Phoenix for several hours and then began moving west and rising in altitude. We last spotted it around lunchtime.
Why am I disappointed in the National UFO Reporting Center (NURC)? Because they have two entries from Phoenix for that day, obviously the same object, only one of them has a brief not at the bottom saying “perhaps it was a helium balloon”) This sighting was obviously not investigated or followed-up with at all.
How many more of the sightings in their database were similarly disproved but not marked as such?
Anyway, here’s a picture of the UFO as it appeared that day:
