10 Objects That Have Been Mistaken For UFOs

There are only a handful of people out there who claim to have seen an honest-to-goodness UFO in the sky. If they didn’t believe in aliens before that moment they certainly did afterward, regardless of whether or not someone tried to explain it away.

The truth is usually that they saw something, and if it’s not a UFO, what was it?

Well, if history is any indication, it could have been one of the objects below.

In 2017, a large balloon from Google’s Company X landed in Columbia.

Farmers there thought they saw it leaking a “strange liquid,” but local police quickly identified it was a balloon.

You might think that no one could mistake the blimp for anything other than it is, but when it flew over MetLife Stadium during a 2020 football game, a few eyewitnesses took video.

The sightings went viral, but the blimp was quickly identified by others.

A pyrotechnic display by the U.S. Army Golden Knights Parachute Team in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina provoked a number of UFO reports during its first year.

Even though the Sun Fun Festival and its coordinated parachute jump is a well-attended event, false sightings are reported every single year.

Image Credit: iStock

According to experts, Venus is one of the most common objects that people report as being a UFO.

There’s an account of Georgia police officers chasing an object that turned out to be a planet, and I guess we can sort of blame it on Venus being both bright and near the horizon.

Sort of.

A Fox affiliate in Denver shared a video in 2012 that they alleged was a UFO..but that turned out to be a bug.

Perspective is a funny thing, and even small insects can look as big as an aircraft if you skew it hard enough.

At least one caller from Hertfordshire, UK, thought he saw an “unidentified object” hovering near their house and moving closer.

Eventually they admitted it had stopped, and then called back to sheepishly confess they had been looking at the moon the entire time.

Hobby drones seem like an obvious entry to this list. They look like small spaceships in many cases, and they can be anywhere and everywhere.

Some even come equipped with LED lights, which confuses eyewitnesses even more.

In December 2017, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 lifted off from Southern California. It made a ghostly shape in the sky, spooking more than a few residents to make panicked calls to authorities.

So many, in fact, that the fire department had to issue an alert letting people know what it was.

You can put lights on your kite, too, which can trip up your casual UFO-spotter in the wilderness.

In 2011, a few people in Vancouver reported a pulsating, lit object in the sky that turned out to be a Chinese kite.

When moist air flows over a geological feature like a mesa, mountain, or the like, hitting the air current above, it creates a downward wave. That wave can evaporate into a large, lens-shaped cloud called a lenticular cloud that does, indeed, resemble a flying saucer.

They’ve actually been dubbed “flying saucer clouds,” and have confused more than a few folks in their day.

I can definitely see how most of these could confuse a person. Especially if alcohol was some kind of a factor.

I’m not convinced about the aliens, but I won’t be mad about it if I’m wrong.