UFO Hoax Revealed

[ZapperZ]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090402/sc_livescience/ufohoaxwasasocialexperiment

Did you fall for the social experiment?

In a posting at Skeptic.com, the pair said the hoax was a "social experiment on how to create your own media event surrounding UFO sightings...to show everyone how unreliable eyewitness accounts are, along with investigators of UFOs."

Zz.

[Ivan Seeking]

No, but it seems that the linked skeptic isn't universally skeptical. The National Guard has claimed credit for the Phoenix Lights that he attitributes to a hoaxer.

... The lights were flares, said the Air National Guard, dropped during nighttime exercises at the Barry M. Goldwater Range.

That's what they were, insists Lt. Col. Ed Jones, who piloted one of the four A10s in the squadron that he says launched the flares.

Jones, in his first interview with the news media concerning the night 10 years ago, says he can't believe a decision to eject a few leftover flares turned into a UFO furor that continues to this day.
[continued]
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070301/NEWS07/703010425/1001/NEWS

So it would seem that the hoaxer hoaxed the skeptic.

As is always the case, unless we find detailed descriptions of the craft or of highly exotic behavior, preferably by many credible observers, or better yet, on RADAR, there is no reason to get excited.

[zoobyshoe]

No, but it seems that the linked skeptic isn't universally skeptical. The National Guard has claimed credit for the Phoenix Lights that he attitributes to a hoaxer.
The deliberately hoaxed Phoenix lights he refers to appeared in 2008. This is not the same incident as the National Guard Flare release of 1997:

I examined the case the next day, noting striking parallels between this sighting and the infamous 2008 Phoenix Lights hoax in which flares were tied to balloons. I provided a detailed, point-by-point analysis showing that the New Jersey lights were almost certainly a copycat hoax.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090402/sc_livescience/ufohoaxwasasocialexperiment

Thus the mysterious Phoenix Lights of 2008 are explained. Any object seen in the sky, especially at night, can be very difficult to identify, and it's no wonder that the lights puzzled many people...

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080423-bad-phoenix-lights.html

[Evo]

No, but it seems that the linked skeptic isn't universally skeptical. The National Guard has claimed credit for the Phoenix Lights that he attitributes to a hoaxer.


http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070301/NEWS07/703010425/1001/NEWS

So it would seem that the hoaxer hoaxed the skeptic. The link says "page not found". This guy's claim that they dropped flares from the air are not consistant with the reports in the link to the article that the skeptic linked to.

1) The formation of the lights is consistent with independently moving objects, not fixed lights on an aircraft. They rose into the air together, stayed in more or less the same formation while in the same air currents, then drifted apart as they gained altitude. Also, the mysterious lights drifted toward the east—the same direction as the wind.

3) The way the lights disappeared also supports the hoax theory. They did not zoom away at high speed, as one might expect from an aircraft. Nor did they all suddenly and mysteriously disappear. Instead, eyewitnesses reported that the lights were visible for between 15 and 30 minutes, until they went out one by one. This is exactly the pattern we would expect to see from flares that were lit (and launched) in sequence: they would go up, remain lit for about 20 minutes, then first flare would extinguish. A minute or two later the second would burn out, and so on.

4) One of the hoaxer's neighbors, a Mr. Mailo, actually saw the hoaxer launch the helium balloons and flares. Mailo said the flares were lit about 8 p.m., just before the UFO lights were first sighted. I can not imagine how flares dropped to the ground would be able to go back up into the air and float for ~ 20 minutes.

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080423-bad-phoenix-lights.html

Zooby beat me.

[Ivan Seeking]

The deliberately hoaxed Phoenix lights he refers to appeared in 2008. This is not the same incident as the National Guard Flare release of 1997:

Ah, the infamous incident that I never even heard of or immediately wrote-off as nonsense. Got it. My mistake.

I checked the UFO news thread but no reference was found. I did see a few news alerts in my google alerts. Yep, infamous indeed.