Other "evidence"

Obviously, there are loads and loads of web pages that study UFOs. I'm not really going to dignify these with any response. Suffice it to say that there are lots of things in the sky that are unidentified that don't have to be aliens. Birds, planes, meteors, and reflections can all appear as UFOs, and imaginations can create UFOs where nothing is really seen.

Needless to say, there are lots of people who work pretty hard to show rationally that UFOs are really just normal terrestrial activities that we understand.

Philip Plait, who runs the truly excellent web page www.badastronomy.com, has done some of this debunking. One reason for people seeing UFOs, he says, is pareidolia, which is the phenomenon of seeing familiar objects or patterns in an indistinct medium (like faces in the clouds). Plait shows "Vladimir Lenin in his shower curtain":

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/lenin.html

(Click here if you don't see the face.) By the way, Phil Plait's site has excellent movie reviews as well.

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