JMartJr
Senior Member.
I guess a flight of individual aircraft would look huge if you thought they were all one object?Am I to doubt every witness who describes the phenomenon as massive ?
Size estimates are not always accurate, though. Ask 50 people what object held at arm's length would be about the right size to cover the full moon. See what sort of answers you get. When I tried it years ago, I got ranges from an orange or baseball, to a golf ball, to a US quarter-dollar coin. The correct answer is of course much smaller -- something around the size of an aspirin tablet (as aspirin is sold in the US, I know it is sold as much smaller pills in China, not sure how the rest of the world makes their OTC pain relief pills.) Nobody guessed something too small, all guessed something much too big. And this was the moon, which we've all seen repeatedly and with which we are pretty familiar, and without the adrenaline boost of seeing a mysterious UFO fly by!*
Of course my experiment was not a valid statistical sample, so yeah, try it yourself if you want to, see what you find out.
*The very first book I read that dealt with things like control groups and statistically valid samples and interpreting statistical data was "Shark Attack" by H. David Baldridge, an analysis of the data in the shark attack files complied to that point by the US Navy. One of the things discussed was whether witnesses estimate of the size of the shark were reasonably accurate. They ran a test where witnesses stood with their backs to a big tank of seawater, and were told to turn around where they either saw a shark swimming by or a length of PVC pipe in the water. Estimates of the pipe length were pretty good, the sharks were always described as bigger than they were -- presumably it was more exciting to see a shark than some pipe, and excitement led to the experience being evaluated by the witness as larger than life, as it were. I still have the book around here somewhere, if I can find it I'll re-read it and try to find the section to quote.