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Recap: Often you will hear "expert" witnesses proudly and with certitude declaring the distance, size, and enormous speeds of UFOs (where "UFO" despite its actual meaning is taken to be an alien craft). I discuss why this is simply not possible based on a visual observation.

Puzzler: In searching for extrasolar planets, one of the most favorable scenarios is where a planet passes directly in front of their star as seen from Earth, so we see it transiting (hence why it's called the "transit" method). Let's say an Earth-sized planet transits in front of a Sun-like star, and a Jupiter-like planet also transits in front of that star. They are very slightly offset so that they don't overlap as seen from Earth. First, does it matter how close either planet is to the star to how much light it will block? Second, does it matter how far away we are (assuming we're at least several light-years) as observers to how much light each will block? You can assume that the system is many light-years away from us.

Solution to Episode 1's Puzzler: From first quarter through third quarter, the moon would appear full, and from third through first, it would appear new. Click here to see a visual explanation of this.

Additional Materials:

Transcript of the Main Material:

First, before I really get into this topic, I want to define my terms. I realize that a "UFO" stands simply for "Unidentified Flying Object." Unfortunately, that term has been taken over by the alien visitation community such that when you hear "UFO" today, it almost always is equated with aliens. That's how I'm using the term in this episode because that's what I'm going to be discussing.

Claim: One of the claims that I often hear of the UFOs = aliens community is that they see an object they can't explain, think it's an alien craft, and then proceed to give an estimate for exactly how far away it is, how big it is, and how fast it was traveling.

On its face, this may seem to be completely reasonable. After all, when you see a car on the road, you can usually estimate how far away it is, how fast it's traveling, and how big it is... [Clip from Coast to Coast AM, Feb 12, 2009, Hour 2, 5:09]

But, this completely breaks down when you look up in the sky and have no reference point. All we can really know are two things: The angular size, and the angular speed.

"Angular Size" is a term meaning how big an object appears to be. This is measured as an angle. If you stare straight ahead and turn around in a complete circle, you have just turned 360°. There are 360° in a circle, and we can divide each single degree into 60 minutes. Each minute can be divided into seconds. So angles work very much like time in terms of using a hexadecimal system. Astronomers often refer to objects having an angular size in terms of seconds because we usually look at small objects.

An "Angular Speed" is just like a size -- we measure how fast something is moving in terms of the angular distance between its starting and ending location.

Putting these terms together, I could say, for example, that I observe a comet that is 10 arcseconds in size that moves across the sky 2° per day.

To put any physical units to these - like how far away it is, how big it would be if I measured it with a ruler, or how fast it's moving through space - I would need to know IN PHYSICAL UNITS one of those measurements along with the two angular ones.

Now, I realize that I've just gone through what may seem to be like a lot of geometry. To try to simplify things and show you why ANYONE who claims they know the distance, size, and speed of a UFO is fooling themselves, let's go outside. [Clip from Coast to Coast AM, Apr 13, 2009, Hour 2, 32:30]

Imagine that flying overhead are two birds. They're fairly high up, so you don't know what kinds of birds they are. You see one that looks big and is moving slowly and one that looks small and is moving quickly. Which is farther away? Which is really bigger, and which is really moving faster?

You could guess that the one that LOOKS bigger is actually closer, meaning that it's just lazily gliding along, while the one that looks smaller is farther away and is really booking it across the sky.

Or you could guess that because of the speeds, the one that's farther away is the one that's moving more slowly, so in reality it must be HUGE because it looks bigger than the one you're assuming is closer.

You know their angular size - how big they APPEAR to be - and their angular speed - how fast they APPEAR to be moving - but without making an assumption, you can't actually know which is bigger, which is farther away, and how fast they're really going. [Clip from Coast to Coast AM, Feb 12, 2009, Hour 4, 6:02]

As another example, we observe the moon very often from Earth. It looks big and bright relative to other objects in the sky, but we really have, as humans, no concept of how big it REALLY is relative to the stars and planets we also see.

And from our vantage point, we think it's not moving at all, but it's actually moving about 36 times faster than a car going the speed limit on the highway.

A final issue I wanted to raise is the claim people make that the craft "shoots straight up" [Clip from Coast to Coast AM, Dec 14, 2010, Hour 3, 16:30]. There is no "up" in the sky that we can tell. We tell "up" by things getting smaller. This is simply another case where human perception is incredibly flawed, and people don't seem to realize it.

So by this point, I've hopefully convinced you that anyone who makes a visual observation of a UFO and then claims size, speed, and distance, is very much misguided, to put it mildly. I don't care if you're a pilot, a member of the armed forces, a police officer, a firefighter, a beloved grandmother, or a former U.S. President. If you claim that based on your by-eye observations that you know these three pieces of information, you are wrong.