Mooning the Moon
This one’s making the rounds on the ‘tubes. In summary, an emergency services call was made by a man in Wales about some bright thing in the sky…Which turned out to be the Moon.
It embodies the entire UFO thing, people who are unfamiliar with the sky seeing something unfamiliar to them and guessing what it might be. However, the sky can do a lot of unfamiliar things. Parhelia, iridium flares, satellite passes, planets[1], stars[1], birds[2] noctilucent clouds, tangent arcs, all things unfamiliar to the common man or woman, all things extremely common in “UFO” reports.
There are two things at play here. First is a memory illusion, people tend to remember something bright as being big even if it isn’t big at all. My brother once said to me in the car “Did you see that big flying light that was following us?” and he described a glowing orb…Yet he’d been watching Venus which was certainly bright, but not at all big. He swore blind that he’d seen a sizeable orb, yet when I showed him Venus the next night, he agreed that was what he’d seen. The second is that memory is not a reliable testimony of events. Memory is half observation and half expectation; You see what you expect to see. If you expect that a bright unfamiliar thing in the sky is a flying saucer, you will see a flying saucer.
[1] Planets and stars may seem familiar to everyone, but few people realise how very bright the planets can become. Jupiter and Venus can be many times brighter than an aeroplane and, being stationary, they appear to follow a moving observer. Venus accounted for, according to the Ministry of Defence, almost 90% of all “UFO” reports when the MoD was collecting them; It isn’t anymore.
[2] Kenneth Arnold famously saw a V shaped formation of small (but bright) lights “like a saucer skipping on a lake”, describing how they jerkily moved. He was seeing geese in migration and, flying over mountains, he was in the shadow of a mountain and they were illuminated by the sun. Birds can look very bright in those conditions. Sunset looking towards a coast will also show you seabirds very brightly illuminated. The jerky motion was added by Kenneth’s light aircraft.