'Invisible UFOs'?

By Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries staff writer

July 18, 2012 Updated Jul 19, 2012 at 9:15 AM PDT

"Why are all the good UFOs invisible?" one Gather.com user asked in response to the latest "invisible UFO" report posted to the site.

You might have thought a defining characteristic of a UFO would be visibility. But thanks to zealous alien hunters doggedly scanning the sky with night-vision cameras, a new class of flying objects that only emit infrared light has emerged from the darkness. Are they spies from the great beyond?

"Some people claim to see actual battles between UFOs up in the sky, using night-vision equipment," the ufologist Robert Sheaffer told Life's Little Mysteries. "Those devices magnify faint objects so much that the sky seems to be filled with invisible UFOs. In reality, of course, they are seeing owls, bats, moths, airplanes, satellites, etc." Night-vision optics trade low resolution for high sensitivity, he explained, so that points of light (such as distant satellites) spill out into circles that make the objects appear huge.

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