Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
If this same event (at 11:00 in this video) were witnessed at night by someone who was unaware that these were distant aircraft, we might get this kind of eye witness testimony:
One object on the left was moving fast, and about 5 others were just hovering. They were close, just a few hundred feet. They couldn't have been aircraft because there was no noise.
What's actually happening:
They are distant so what we hear are chirping birds, radio chatter and a still camera clicking. The helicopter on our left is traveling across our line of sight and the others are traveling along our line of sight, but they are all probably traveling at the same airspeed.
The next scene (11:10) might be described:
There were about 10 of them drifting very slowly to the left, just over the treetops on the edge of the meadow.
What's actually happening:
They are flying at speed toward a point somewhat to our left. At night witnesses might not notice the motion along their line of sight, but only notice the motion across their line of sight. They might believe these are small nearby objects drifting slowly sideways to the left.
These aircraft are distant, which is apparent in daylight but at night they would just be lights in a dark sky and may be misperceived as being smaller, closer objects. Because of parallax effects and perspective distortion, distant objects are liable to be perceived as moving in two dimensions - across our line of sight only, rather than in their true 3 dimensional motions. Motion along our line of sight is less apparent than motion across our line of sight.
A single witness or a small group at night in isolation (lonely, spooky setting) see lights in the sky doing odd things. They get spooked, which alters their perceptions, they want to believe they lived through a mysterious (entertaining) happening, etc.
Since the earliest days of the UFO era, all this has been a persistent problem.
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