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There is a precedent for exactly this kind of thing: The Marfa Lights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights). T

There is a precedent for exactly this kind of thing: The Marfa Lights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights). These were strange sighting of moving lights in a desert landscape. They were attributed to UFO's or exotic ball lighting (all this was "pre-drone"). The phenomena were regular enough that some physicists performed a spectroscopic analysis. Turned out, it was headlights of cars in the distance and small campfires. Lights in a place where you can see very far away tends to confuse our perception of scale, distance and speed. > I think the reality is investigations are hard and sometimes yield nothing, but that doesn't mean we should jump to preposterous conclusions. I agree. "Occam's Razor" is wise.

ALittleLight 7y ago
Okay, there is one and presumably many more examples of people mistaking non-flying lights for flying things. How many times do people accurately identify drones though? I don't mean airline pilots flying into or out of airports overzealously reporting nearby drones, but how frequently does your average person see something they are so confident is a drone they go to the trouble of reporting it to local officials, and turn out to be wrong? It seems to me, if we had that latter figure, and we knew how many independent reports there were, we could calculate the likelihood that every reporter was mistaken.
carapace 7y ago
> The first historical record of the Marfa lights is that in 1883 a young cowhand, Robert Reed Ellison, saw a flickering light while he was driving cattle through Paisano Pass and wondered if it was the campfire of Apache Indians. Other settlers told him they often saw the lights, but that when they investigated they found no ashes or other evidence of a campsite. So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or other evidence of a campsite".
- icedistilled 7y ago
  >Lights in a place where you can see very far away tends to confuse our perception of scale, distance and speed. Did the campfire smoke spell out their exact location to nicely make up for the distorted distance perspective for lights at night?
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  > So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or other evidence of a campsite". ... and also not little green men from Mars nor up-close sightings of ball lighting in 120 years. The distances here are large (potentially 10's of miles with mountains) and the phenomena occur at dusk/night/dawn. It would be very hard to localize such lights by merely eyeballing it and then walking for hours over rugged desert to where it looked like it came from.

ALittleLight 7y ago

Okay, there is one and presumably many more examples of people mistaking non-flying lights for flying things. How many times do people accurately identify drones though? I don't mean airline pilots flying into or out of airports overzealously reporting nearby drones, but how frequently does your average person see something they are so confident is a drone they go to the trouble of reporting it to local officials, and turn out to be wrong? It seems to me, if we had that latter figure, and we knew how many independent reports there were, we could calculate the likelihood that every reporter was mistaken.

carapace 7y ago

> The first historical record of the Marfa lights is that in 1883 a young cowhand, Robert Reed Ellison, saw a flickering light while he was driving cattle through Paisano Pass and wondered if it was the campfire of Apache Indians. Other settlers told him they often saw the lights, but that when they investigated they found no ashes or other evidence of a campsite. So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or other evidence of a campsite".

icedistilled 7y ago
>Lights in a place where you can see very far away tends to confuse our perception of scale, distance and speed. Did the campfire smoke spell out their exact location to nicely make up for the distorted distance perspective for lights at night?
crispyambulance 7y ago
> So it wasn't car headlights in 1883 and "no ashes or other evidence of a campsite". ... and also not little green men from Mars nor up-close sightings of ball lighting in 120 years. The distances here are large (potentially 10's of miles with mountains) and the phenomena occur at dusk/night/dawn. It would be very hard to localize such lights by merely eyeballing it and then walking for hours over rugged desert to where it looked like it came from.