4/25/2008

Fishing line, helium balloons and flares

Filed under: Culture, Fun and Games, Science — Tim @ 12:41 am

Aside from sounding like some kind of plan hatched by MacGyver, what do those items have in common?

I’ll give you a hint: UFOs.

It turns out that those “mysterious” unexplainable lights in Phoenix are, like every other sighting: very explainable.

I actually kind of find it funny because it was just some guy playing a fun prank:

[...] he used fishing line to attach road flares to helium-filled balloons, then lit the flares and launched them a minute apart from his back yard. He said he believed turbulence created by a passing jet caused the balloons to move around.

If anything it shows just how unskeptical some people still are — jumping to conclusions in an effort to prove their beliefs in ET.

Kind of like deists sometimes do, right?

And it’s not that I knew the correct explanation, but a spoonful of Occam’s razor keeps the boogie man at bay. And cures cancer.