I'll just repost this:
True story, but apologies in advance for length.
You remember the UFO flap a few years back, when we had Nick Pope "Britain's Own Fox Mulder^tm" telling us about major UFO incidents in the UK?
Well, there's one story that he kept trotting out about a UFO being spotted at a major UK airfield. This story he said, MUST have been a genuine UFO incident because it had been spotted by the base's guards and also, critically, by Air Traffic Controllers and a trained Meteorological Observer, who would therefore be ideally suited to gauge the height, size, and speed of the object in question (having been well experienced in gauging cloud heights and weather balloon heights and speeds).
Unfortunately however, this incident turned out to be more a case of how easy it is to fool even an experienced observer. Or, more accurately, how people tend to see what they've been set up to expect to see.
Over the previous couple of weeks there had been major airtime and press coverage of UFOs over England. When the first calls were made to the Met office on the night in question the observer shrugged them off. However after the gate guards also rung up to tell him they'd seen the UFO he went outside again and saw what he described as "Three lights at the angles of a very large triangular object, moving extremely quickly to the south of the airfield, after a few minutes a fourth beam of light appeared from the object directed to the ground."
The "Extremely large" object he'd actually seen was a Police Helicopter, as was later established from it's flight log. However, because he (and the guards for that matter) was subconciously expecting to see a UFO, that's what he reported. The airfield had been closed for the night as it was a bank holiday weekend with no night flying scheduled, so there weren't actually any Air Traffic Controllers on duty. Had there been they would undoubtedly have been able to contact the UFO, bursting the myth there and then.
( stuj (^(^;;^)^) GO TEAM SPIDERS!(^(^;;^)^), Thu 1 May 2014, 15:53, 1 reply)

Kastrian recon drone!
Disguised as etc
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Sat 3 May 2014, 12:47, closed)