My UFO experience

I've got another fun story to tell, a story of a subject that's a popular target for skeptics.

UFOs, lights in the sky. Everybody knows they're all easily explainable, right?

Not the one I saw. That doesn't mean I've experienced evidence for the existence of alien life, just that I saw something in the night sky that my collective base of knowledge was unable to explain with the usual rational dismissals.

The story is simply this. I was walking away from a restaurant, through the parking lot. It was a nice, crisp, clear night, I had looked up at the sky to see what the seeing conditions were like. I'm not even really an amateur astronomer, but I'd taken an interest in such things and was just curious what the sky looked like that night.
You see, if you get a map of light pollution for North America you'll see a few spots that have the worst light pollution of the entire country. I happen to live in one of those spots, directly underneath the massive white canopy surrounding Chicago indicating that the area has the worst classification of light pollution. This means that, if I wanted to point my camera at the sky to capture a classic star trail picture, the sky would turn a disgusting shade of vomit-red and overwhelm the stars before I had any significant trails. When I look at the night sky I see only some of the brightest stars. The night sky is never exactly black to me, and the horizon glows as if sunrise was perpetually just a half an hour or so away.

So I was pleased when I looked up and the sky seemed a little bit darker than was normal. Perhaps the air was unusually dry and thus there was less water vapor to reflect the megawatts of street and parking lot lighting perpetually blazing away to banish the dark night from the suburban streets.

In any case, I was gazing up at the sky, and just as I'd had my fill and had turned my eyes back to more mundane terrestrial matters, namely finding my way to the car, a sudden faint memory of seeing something unusual in the sky registered in my brain. I wasn't entirely sure if I had really seen something or if I'd imagined it. But the memory was off a peculiar faint light moving at a highly unusual speed through the night sky. Reflexively I glanced back up, the memory telling me roughly where to look. For a moment I couldn't find it, then I caught it again. Two faint, diffuse light sources moving across the sky at an absurdly high rate of speed.
Any composure I may have had was totally lost. I was out with my parents to dinner, and I attempted to alert them to the rather unusual spectacle unfolding in the heavens to no result. I think I managed to stammer something along the lines of "ohmygodIjustsawaUFO!", only with less clarity. But long before I could direct their attention to the lights they were gone, having faded away into the light pollution haze on the horizon.

Here's what I can say with certainty about what I saw. As I said, there were two lights, both with a visible circular shape. That is it wasn't a point source of light, I clearly saw two circles. They were moving together, but they weren't entirely static compared to each other. It's difficult to explain, but while they moved with respect to each other it still appeared as if they were connected. My crude explanation is that it was as if I was looking at lights located on the wingtips of an aircraft, and if it were to rock its wings slightly from side to side the lights would move towards or away from each other, but in a fixed, predictable pattern. They did not look like, say, a pair of balloons bobbing independently in the breeze.

If you're wondering why my first notice of them was that weird half memory experience, I think I have an explanation for that. For whatever reason we humans have two different types of light receptors in our eyes, cone cells and rod cells. Cone cells need more light to work but react faster and allow us to see color (because there's three different kinds of them), and rod cells are pretty much the reverse, working in less light but producing no color information. The interesting thing is that we have more cone cells in the center of our vision and more rods in our peripheral vision. Astronomers know this well, a standard trick when looking for faint objects in the night sky is to look at the area in question with the edges of their vision to employ the greater density of rod cells.
I found this reference in wikipedia:
"The convergence of rod cells also tends to make peripheral vision very sensitive to movement, and is responsible for the phenomenon of individuals seeing something vague occur out of the corner of his or her eye."

Until tonight I've never seen that explanation, but it does rather a good job of explaining why I had already looked away from the sky before I realized what I'd seen.


I was facing roughly south, and the lights were moving in the direction I faced. Now that I look at the parking lot I see that it's not oriented directly to the south. So if anything it came from slightly East of exact North and went slightly West of South.

I've seen satellites passing overhead. I once managed to see the International Space Station. I've seen an Iridium Flare. I know what those things look like. They do NOT look like large, faint circles of light. Furthermore they move a lot slower than what I saw. So if I was looking at something outside of our atmosphere it was moving far too fast to be in orbit. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, it would have had to be a quite large object or pair of objects for me to see a visible disc from the ground with my naked eyes.

I find the aircraft explanation equally unsatisfactory. Simply because it was moving FAR too quickly, plus, again, the large circle problem. I haven't really done the math to estimate the speed, but unless the object had been quite low and therefore close to me it would have had to be going faster than the speed of sound. Most likely several times the speed of sound. Passenger jets positively crawl through the sky from the perspective of the ground compared to what I saw. First off aircraft tend not to fly that quickly, even military aircraft spend most of their time on the subsonic side of the sound barrier. Secondly when they do go that fast they tend to bombard the ground with a supersonic shockwave that's rather difficult to miss. I experienced no sonic boom.

I also know well what meteors look like. They can show a wide variety of appearances, from brief streaks of very fast moving light to slower, more detailed debris showers that appear when you're closer and it's fallen far enough to have slowed down. They can show enough speed to explain what I saw, but they tend not to travel in symmetrical pairs that travel together across the sky.. and, again, no large, faint circles. A meteor should have been a lot brighter.

So what was it?

There's only one rational explanation I find even slightly persuasive. Spotlights. The suburbs are often loaded with these things, and it's no problem for a spotlight to project a faint circle of light in the sky that moves at speeds apparently faster than the speed of sound.
Two problems with that theory. First off I've already established that it was an exceptionally clear night. No cloud layer to speak of. There would have had to be SOME sort of layer up there to reflect the circles of light while at the same time the air was still dry enough for there to be no visible beam of light emanating from the ground.
Secondly I've seen no spotlight that does what these lights did. There's a very traditional spotlight pattern, four individual lights that trace large circles in the sky and then rejoin in the center of each of their patterns. I've never seen a spotlight pattern that involves two lights sweeping a straight path across the sky and then stopping. There was no repetition, I was looking.

I'm classifying it as a UFO. I think the term is appropriate. By which I mean "unidentified flying object". I can't be certain that it was an object at all, but other than that it was certainly unidentified. You won't find me declaring that I've seen an alien space ship because I don't know what it was. To tell the truth I have no idea why aliens would go to all that trouble to fly through the sky showing faint lights.

But I hope I've demonstrated that I've done the best I can to apply the usual explanations. My nature is to seek explanations. When I see a magic trick my first reaction is to work on figuring out how it was done.

But none of the usual explanations has satisfactorily explained this experience. I'd actually like to present this story to some hard core skeptics some time, if they can come up with a decent explanation I'd have to accept it. I admit I'd be at least a wee bit disappointed, but no more so than when learning the secret of some secret of stage magic (basically a lot of what you see in stage magic is fake, even the alleged restraints are often break-aways that are discarded as soon as the curtain goes down).

For the moment though I have to file this under the category of the unresolved.