At last, an excellent analysis by someone whose critical faculties are intact! I couldn't have done better myself. (I once debunked a supposed UFO picture Dale Gowdy gave me the same way, using just a straightedge and a grease pencil. He was not happy!)

This particular type of lens flare is called "coma," after the Latin word for "hairy" (source of our word "comet.") The uninformed have been mistaking it for alien spaceships since at least the 1950's.

Regardless of what anyone says they saw or did not see, this photo has been submitted as evidence, and it fails the most basic scientific test of all, Occam's Razor. It should be easy to prove this is lens flare by going back to the same location at night and framing the same photo with the same camera/lens combination. I would bet my life that the same phenomena will be duplicated. (Oh, and make sure you take off any filters on the lens, they can produce some quite spectacular artifacts!)

Arizona MUFON needs to find itself a new director. Anybody who can't tell lens flare from a genuine anomaly has no business investigating UFO sightings, no matter how well intentioned.

And Nussbeck... is a bona fide... (edited) If anybody believes you can get information from the sub-pixel level, I have a slightly used bridge I'd like to sell you... in Brooklyn. Cheap.

Sorry to be so prolific with my comments but I have just noticed something else important. In her interview, Mrs Dickey says:

"These photos are not [lens] flares. They have been determined by scientists whom I communicate with on these matters to contain portholes, are sometimes metallic, have people that are seen inside some of the portholes, have plasma surrounding the ships, and electromagnetic fields. I have hundreds of examples of lens flares and the UFOs are completely different. Also some objects show movement."

Would I be correct in guessing that the main (only?) "scientist" that Mrs Dickey is referring to here is Ron Nussbeck? I have no idea if Mr Nussbeck has any actual scientific credentials, but someone has reminded me that he is the promoter of a process called PPP (Penetrating Photographic Process) that claims to be able to squeeze from the simple RGB data of pixels in an image the data for a matrix of even smaller pixels, thus !@#$%ping up the resolution of the original image, and apparently this can be done time and again without any limit. If this could be proved to be possible then Mr Nussbeck would certainly have contributed to the world one of the greatest scientific advancements ever. We could, for example, dispense with telescopes and use the humblest of webcams to explore the farthest reaches of the universe - not only to discover alien life-forms in distant galaxies, but also to peer through their curtains to see what they are watching on their televisions. (That kind of puts the dream of perpetual motion into the shade, doesn't it?)

Well, it is now nearly four months since Mr Nussbeck promised to "produce a technical document at a later date" that would explain how his miraculous process is supposed to work. Is it too much to hope that he has now had long enough to complete this document and will publish it ASAP.

While we are all holding our breaths for that one, Swampmoon might be interested to know that Mr Nussbeck has also offered $10,000 to anyone who can debunk his photographs. I am not sure if that challenge applies to this particular photograph, but if it does then I am sure that you might be in with a good chance of claiming the forfeit. Something tells me, however, that in reality you have a snowball's chance in hell of ever seeing the cash.

I have finally found a decent version of the original image (with, however, the enlargement inserts already applied) at:

http://www.alienseekernews.com/articles/interview-with-christine-dickey.html

It does, at least, appear to be the full size image, and what it importantly reveals is that it is a time lapse exposure (probably taken from a tripod), such that all the stars in the image are slightly streaked. What is significant about this? Well look at this crop of the area of the sky where the so-called "mothership" is supposed to be located. Can anyone tell the difference between the supposed "mothership" and the streaked stars surrounding it?

http://i39.tinypic.com/kaqjxi.jpg

Interestingly, Mrs Dickey says nothing about a mothership in her interview. It seems to me that (and I am putting the most charitable possible interpretation on this) Mr Nussbeck saw the insert with the enlarged blue object (which the high resolution image reveals to be just a streaked star) in the reduced resolution images and assumed that it was an anomalous object and thus a "mothership".

One final point. Note that while the stars in the image are streaked, the "mushroom" objects are not, which is exactly what one would expect if they were stationary optical effects - i.e., lens flares.

So, there is no mothership, and even more evidence that the caustic photographic objects are merely lens flares. Sorry, but there it is.

"Why do the flares look like mushrooms?"

I believe that in optics they are called "caustics". See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_(optics)

(Is this a UFO or lens flare:

http://i41.tinypic.com/9gzwia.jpg

I don't know for certain, but I sure know which I think is most likely.)

Do you not find it a strange coincidence that the angles of the central axes through these "mushrooms" (i.e., the axis of symmetry) exactly matches the angle of the lines drawn connecting them through the center of the picture to the street lights?

Are some of you people really saying that we should take every purported UFO photograph and video at face value and not subject it to any critical examination? No wonder debunkers see UFOlogy as such an easy target.

As I said before, if this sighting was real (AND considered so important) then I find it hard to believe that only one image was taken of it. Please release any other images that you may have taken to prove that these "objects" move around and do not always exhibit the characteristic of lens flares. Until then I will, I'm afraid, remain deeply doubtful.

By the way, I counted no less than 9 lampposts and a gigantic light (to the right on the house) making it 10 light sources, possibly 11, but there are only 5 "flares", what happened to the rest? Do we now have flare selective lenses available for our cameras? Why would the center be blue and all the others not, or why isn't the center source the same as the rest? I'm loving this. Swampmoon, sounds like a mechanical engineer trying to be a photo expert trying to convince himself that what he is looking at is not true. Wake up and smell the coffee buddy, get your duckies all in a row before you try to debunk something like this. Gotta give you kudos for the good use of angle depiction on five of the "flares". Other than that, Just take two aspirins and call back in the morning...

This is the typical reaction:

A- if its clear and precise, then it must be a fake, CGI or modelled, lens flares, etcetera

B- if its blurry, then it must not be what it is claimed to be since no self describing features can be selected, once again lens flares, birds, insects, etcetera.

When will the circus take a break? I for one have seen these type of things since my early childhood, flying around, coming in and out of the ocean, doing flyovers of Navy ships, and observing missile launches off coast, and I didn't need a camera to tell me what it was not. Most anyone that has observed one will never forget it. What most of our local civilians forget is that the camera works different from what your eye does in many ways. Your average person out there only knows to point and shoot, they have no idea what all the other settings on the camera are for. I would accept lens flare if the camera were close to the lamps, but unfortunately it seems to be several hundred feet away. The lamp light is white, so where does the chroma come from for the flare? Were there filters used? Was it foggy outside? Why would the flares not look like the cameras Iris opening? Why do the flares look like mushrooms? Why, why, why...

Quote: "...these photos are the best that have ever been taken." - Ronald Nussbeck.

I have a fairly large collection of UFO photographs and videos that I keep both for comparative study and for trying to open the minds of "skeptics". I have to say that even before the current controversy errupted over this particular image, I hadn't actually bothered to download it to my hard drive because I didn't think it would convince anyone of anything. Yet more lights in the night sky with (as another commenter has observed before me) no explanation of how the original dim blobs are transformed into detailed jellyfish (which, it has to said, are characterisic of lens flares) in the inset images. Perhaps Mr Nussbeck could explain why he thinks this image is so "fantastic".

P.s. Another question: wouldn't such an experienced researcher have had a video camera with her or even taken multiple pictures at time intervals with her still camera (which could, of course, have settled this argument)?

Here we have Slampmoon making a compete analysis that this a lens flare as if the witnesses weren't there. And I quote:

Some have stated that the photos maybe lens flares, but let me prove categorically that they are not lens flares from the street lights. At the time Christine Dickey took the photos her husband stood beside her, both viewed the Orb for sometime with their own eyes before taking the photos. Christine and her husband spent the next 15 nights in a row to see if the Orbs could be duplicated by the camera in anyway but it was impossible. Christine can create lens flares with her camera by pointing them directly at the lights with the lens out of focus but the lens flare she creates looks like a ghost image nothing like the Orbs or the Blue Mother ship.
We understand that there are those who would like to debunk the photos by saying lens flare, swamp gas, Venus or military flares. Christine Dickey as a MUFON Investigator for 20 years certifies the images with her own eyes witnessed by her husband. The images can not be repeated, the images are so fantastic debunders must try something, its understandable.
I personally have viewed thousands of UFO photos and I find these photos are the best that have ever been taken."
Best to all of you,
Ronald Nussbeck

#8 - RONALD NUSSBECK - 03/26/2009 - 21:

The witnesses don't count here? They claimed they saw these objects with their eyes ...but they can't be right
we have theories to put forth
t to cross
i to dot.
This is a completely disrespectful of witnesses on the ground. I think we are too quick to jump onto easy explanation when the pictures are good, for that very reason ...Good UFO photos like these always need more research.
Joe Capp
UFO Media Matters
Non-Commercial Blog

I really liked swampmoon's analysis, as far as the photo goes, the street lights are a near perfect match, (I couldent resist), I took it a step farther to actually flip the street lights upside down and simply superimpose them onto the mysterious lights in the sky, (using low tech MS Paint..lol) Id like to re-submit the image..as you can see, its a match. again, but where do the Jelly fish things come from? How do you get Jellyfish from the little blurry dots in the sky? Also SwampMoon is correct in when He says that lenses can be warped, lopsided, imperfect, I had a Canon Powershot once that seemed to make peoples faces fatter, in almost every picture,very weird. Chris

During over 60 years I've heard and read so much about UFOs and I even saw three of them at night, flying at apparently very high altitude. I feel frustrated, because with all the technology availabe nowadays to scientists no one has yet conclusively explained what UFO's are about. A group of individuals makes an easy living by speculating and keeping expectations alive.
Chris Wuth

There are no street lights to cause lens flare in this photo, and the original photographer of the large UFO didn't notice the spheres/orbs accompanying it.

http://i39.tinypic.com/1zqqxyx.jpg

(Doubters should resample/resize the image to double its size in Irfanview or similar. It also helps to reduce the glare of the sky by lowering the gamma of the image.)

I've been seeing these things in RI with my naked eye and on camera. They are real.

We got professional opinions and we got amateur opinions. We got some clown faking these O'Hare videos and photographs and we got some more clowns fessing up to the Morristown lights. The waters are so murky at this point that we can't afford NOT to be suspicious of images like this one. MUFON or one of the recognized pros can clear this up with some boots on the ground and eye-witness reports and heavy analysis of both reports and witnesses. If these lights are real and doing what they are supposedly doing on a regular basis, then get some more images...from multiple witnesses. get some video footage from multiple angles. get some corroboration.

By the way, I failed to mention, our group of six people that watched the episode was 10 miles out in the desert. There were no lights of any kind out there. We had wonderful viewing without interferrence from outside lighting.

Judy Day

Not trying to take sides, but I watched the item for over 7 hours the same night. I saw the same mothership and 5 orbs or scouts around it. The scouts or red lights would leave and return to the mothership a number of times. Then in time, two other white ships joined them. They were not as large as the main mothership, but white and the same color.
I KNOW I did not have lens flares in my eyes! I am 63 and of high IQ, not boasting, but believe me, I know what I saw was there and real!
This was not the first time I have watched the ship. This was the third time it appeared in this reagon. The first time I watched it, it appeared to the north-east of Marana. Same with the second time. This again lasted for hours. The third time it appeared over Scottsdale, Casa Grande then to the North-west of Marana.
We watched it for over 7 hours. The enities would come and go. At times the Mothership transmitted a light. Once it went directly to the ground, other times off in the distance.
The mothership also changed shape on several occations. It would go from an orb or round to an oval shape and back. As it did this, the light would grow a much brighter white. The smaller scouts, as I call them, stayed red.
You may be able to explain the lights in the pictures away, but we had a rather large group watching this and believe me, we all have good eyes with NO lens flares!
I am not saying this to be sarcastic trying to prove anyone wrong, but we KNOW what we saw and believe me, the pictures lined up!
I firmly believe this is all to important to spend time trying to disprove. I look forward to seeing it again and again. By the way, simular items were spotted in Canada as well as Alstraila. They can't all be lens flares!
Again, I respect you right to your opinion, but, to my understanding, there are other pictures of this as well.
I again point out, I am 63 and too old for games, especially when I see it first hand.
Judy K Day.

Your lines following the street lights only account for 4 lights and there are 5 orbs. It seems you made some critical errors in your assessment of lens flares. Sorry, it just does not work for me.

Swampmoon has shown that his logical and analytical abilities are sharp as a tack. His corroboration of the placement of the lights in the sky with the hot light sources on the ground is exactly what you'd expect if you were looking at flaring artifacts from hotspots shot in low light. Joseph, this fellow is right on the money, this has nothing to do with any type of "circular symmetry", he's done the exact right type of analysis - Visio was basically just used to draw straight lines, the rest is right in front of your eyes. The idea of someone having to "replicate" the image in order to discount it, is just not part of any deductive reasoning process. It would prove precious little. Swampmoon has correctly analyzed the source of the lights in the sky of this image, and unlike Nussbeck, I have the experience and professional credentials to back up my opinion.

dB

Good job!

Along this way, we will finally show what are the real UFO.

What we see here is a perfect case of going for the easy explanation. Using Visio is a new one on me to prove they are lens flares. Don't get me wrong they may be. But I think 'I will wait till I get a some more in-depth analysis using the proper software or till someone duplicates these 'Lens flares" with that same camera.
By the way UFO craft have been known to be have "perfect circular symmetry"
We will never have a great photo of a UFO if we always allow researchers to go for the cheep explanation and than we accept it. Sometimes an easy explanation is just wrong. I believe this simply because the are craft in our skies, and they are being photographed... and I believe dismissed... because reseachers conclude they are probably mundane"
The odds are they are wrong some of the time. This startling photographs are always seem fake... don't any of us, that believe in UFO craft, think there is something strange there. I make a plea for anyone out there to try and debunk this explanation of lens flares and see what they come up with. I wish I was a younger man and in good health I take it on myself.
Joe Capp
UFO Media Matters