TI9ZS-1024x576.jpg' alt='Hi-Def Quality Around June ' title='Hi-Def Quality Around June ' />Welcome to Strobist Strobist is the worlds most popular resource for photographers who want how to learn to use their flashes like a pro. Learn more here. Facebook announced today that it sold 100,000 worth of ads to a sketchy network of fake Russian accounts between June 2015 to May 2017, a period spanning the 2016. In this weeks eSkeptic, Tony Ortega debunks the Phoenix Lights the mysterious vee configuration that people reported seeing flying over the state of Arizona. On Sunday, animal lovers around the globe expressed their condolences for Julius, the baby giraffe that was born at the Maryland Zoo in June. In a statement, the zoo. Bluray or Bluray Disc BD is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was designed to supersede the DVD format, in that it is capable of storing hours of. The Skeptics Society Skeptic magazine. The Phoenix Lights Explained Againby Tony Ortega. UFOs make great ratings, so it isnt surprising that NBCS Dateline aired a special on Sunday, May 1. Close Encounters Caught on Tape. To its credit, the NBC program at least made an attempt to provide prosaic explanations for each of the events it presented. In most cases, those explanations were actually pretty good, and the UFO experts for the most part came off as yahoos. But when I realized that they were saving the 1 UFO event caught on tape for last the lame Phoenix Lights, the 1. I helped debunk years ago as a reporter in Arizona, I prepared myself for yet another time that so called journalists wouldnt get even the most basic facts right. I wasnt disappointed. The Full Barbie: A Fairy Secret Movie. For starters, there were two separate events on the night of March 1. Arizona. The mysterious vee configuration of lights that so many people across the state witnessed was seen over Prescott at about 8 1. Phoenix at about 8 3. Tucson at 8 4. 5. Thats 2. 00 miles in thirty minutes which means the vee was moving at about 4. Some early eyewitnesses perceived that it was high in the sky, others swore it was low and moving very slowly. And I mention early purposely. As the months passed, more and more elaborate and ridiculous claims were made by eyewitnesses who were clearly trying to one up each other. As Ive pointed out many times, the eyeball is a poor instrument for judging the altitude of point sources of light in a night sky. Simple physics, however, suggests the vee was high in the sky and moving very fast, even if it looked like it was moving slowly due to the altitude. This kind of image is widely assumed to be the vee or first incident. It actually shows the later flares. This is a digital recreation. The images of the Phoenix Lights presented on the web further confuse the fact that two different incidents happened. The first incident, the original vee, passed overhead with almost no one photographing or filming it. Only one video seems to exist, and since it was shot of an overhead object it does not show a cityscape. This film was never promoted by UFO enthusiasts, perhaps because it doesnt show the famous optical illusion of the dark triangle. Most of the photos and video of the lights were taken of the second incident the flares as people came out in response to the first. These images show the flares in an arc over the Phoenix cityscape, which is sometimes confused with the earlier, overhead vee. As I first revealed in the Phoenix New Times, a young man with a 1. Dobsonian telescope, Mitch Stanley, spotted the vee from his backyard, and saw that it was a formation of airplanes. Using a magnification of 6. X which essentially put him 6. Stanley could see that each light in the sky was actually a double, with one light under each squarish wing. The planes still looked small in his scope suggesting they were flying at high altitude and he didnt know what type they were. But there was no doubt, he told me, that they were planes. After his sighting, Stanley tried to contact a Phoenix city councilwoman who was making noise about the event, as well as a couple of UFO flim flam men working the local scene, but he was rebuffed. I was the first reporter to talk to him, and, as a telescope builder myself, I made a thorough examination of his instrument and his knowledge of it. For the inexperienced a Dobsonian telescope is much easier to move than the typical department store scope its childs play for an experienced observer like Stanley to get a good look at passing planes at altitude. And he had a witness he had told his mother, who was standing nearby, that the lights were planes. After my story, the Arizona Republic also found his story credible and wrote about it. On the night of March 1. Phoenix. A string of lights appeared in the sky, and slowly sank until they disappeared behind the nearby Estrella Mountain range. This was later shown to be a string of flares dropped by the Maryland Air National Guard over the North Tac military range. Dr. Lynne Kitei, featured prominently on the Dateline program, can repeat all she wants to NBC and other media that these lights were magical and intelligent and later showed up just outside her living room window, but the videotapes taken that night by many people show without a doubt that this was a string of mundane lights that fell and disappeared behind the range, exactly as a string of flares dropped by the military planes would have. The problem developed later when people conflated reports of the two sightings. For the many people who had seen the earlier vee pass directly over their heads, the explanation of the flares made no sense whatsoever. News organizations didnt differentiate between the two events or report on the Stanley identification even the Republic stopped referring to its earlier solid reporting on the Lights and began promoting it as unexplained. To this day, programs like Dateline invariably question people who saw the earlier vee event, and quote them saying that flares couldnt possibly explain what they saw. They are right. They didnt see flares, they saw a formation of planes. Dateline repeatedly showed people talking about their memories of the 8 3. Talk about misleading. There was at least one person who videotaped both the 8 3. I saw his tape myself. It clearly showed the five lights of the 8 3. As for the people who swore they saw a black triangular shape joining the five lights of the vee, thats a classic contrast effect of the human eye. In a very telling case, a man who swore he saw a black shape joining the lights of the vee saw it pass directly in front of the moon. At that point, he saw not a black shape but wavy lines pass over the undimmed moon. But rather than conclude that hed seen the contrails of planes, the man, whose perception had already been heavily influenced by the UFO explanation concluded instead that the pilot of the alien craft had turned his spaceship transparent right at that moment so the man could see the moon through it. How convenient Part of what fueled so much confusion over the Phoenix Lights event was the input from a couple of UFO investigators on the scene one of whom was literally put of business after my stories about him came out. For example, when it became obvious that the hundreds of people who saw the vee pass overhead had many different ideas about it some said it was just over their heads, other said it was high in the sky, and no one could agree on the colors of the lights instead of concluding that human beings naturally come up with different perceptions of the same event, these UFOlogists instead began to promote the idea that everyone had seen different vees Again, going by the early reports, there was no doubt that a single vee crossed over the state that night in about a half hour. But by the time the UFOlogists were through, the credulous came to believe that Phoenix was practically under attack by dozens of mile wide triangular space cruisersAlso at fault was the local TV news fraternity, which not only couldnt get the basic facts straight, but also cynically exploited the event for ratings. Were still dealing with the misconceptions they promoted, such asClaim The vee made no sound. Not true. I talked to witnesses in Prescott, a quieter environment, who clearly heard jet noise. Claim The vee didnt show up on radar. None of the UFO investigators bothered to ask for tapes from the FAA in Albuquerque, whose officials at the time told me they only kept tapes for 1. So well never know what the radar picture looked like that night. Claim The 1. Videotapes taken by observers from higher elevations in the Valley saw the flares for a longer period of time than those who were in lower places, confirming that the flares dropped behind the Estrellas. Perhaps its a good thing that NBC has now declared this the numero uno UFO sighting of all time.