x-Poster on Skepfish
The notorious spiral lights in the sky image (above) has recently been making its way around the interwebs and blogosphere at a rather frightening pace. This photo at first glance appears to be a rather elaborate and interesting Photoshop job. This is actually and image taken in the sky above Norway on December 9th, and according to Popsci Magazine
“The Norwegian Meteorological Institute remains unsure of the phenomenon's origins, but astronomers have said that it does not appear connected to the Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights.”
It has now become known that this light show was caused by a failed Russian missile test, that was scheduled and announced ahead of time. Thankfully not all of the reports came out the same way, playing on the eye catching idea of scientists being baffled. The Daily Mail, a UK based paper is one of many to report the truth about this case. Even without confirmation they were able to dig deep enough and discover that the display was most likely from a failed Russian test launch of their Bulava missile.
Unfortunately the truth about this story was not researched enough and many popular news sources like The Huffington Post published stories with more emphases on the unknown lights and the idea of Aliens, and less on what (logically) might have caused them. This led to an otherwise harmless and rather interesting story being used by members of the UFO supporters community twisting it around as proof of the existence of extra-terrestrials.
Once again another fine example of how sloppy or lazy journalism, and a desire for quantity over quality has resulted in a harmless story being taken advantage of to propagate a rather laughable idea like UFOs.
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