I've seen so many UFOs because I spend a lot of time looking at the sky, not just when I'm observing as an amateur astronomer, but just about every time I'm outdoors. I'm more aware of the sky than others, it's my hobby, so I see a lot more. I've seen many things which I immediately recognized as ordinary objects which others have sworn were unexplainable.

Invariably, when people see something they cannot identify, they add details which are not there. Any unusual sighting, like a rocket launch from Canaveral, when witnessed by someone who has never seen one, is often inflated and embellished outrageously. One Yankee friend of mine actually thought he could see portholes in an Atlas rocket launch he saw from Tampa and mistook for a UFO. It is perfectly normal for the human mind to try and provide details to an unusual perceptual experienceto fill in what it cannot properly understand.

The few objects I've seen which I cannot identify are probably just ordinary things that I have seen under unusual conditions. Most of them are probably aircraft, satellites, meteors, animals, balloons etc. I've never seen anything I could positively say was a machine built by non-humans. Maybe they were alien spacecraft, but I had no way of knowing that.

I've seen pictures of these" orbs", but since they only appear to digital cameras, they are obviously some artifact created by that technology. I've never owned a digital camera, but I've been an active film photographer for most of my life and I've never seen anything on a negative that was unexplainable. I have seen some film camera artifacts which I immediately recognized (such as diffraction patterns or shutter effects) which have actually been published as "proof" of UFOs.

Since these orbs cannot be seen by the eye, or show up on film, they are probably caused by the camera circuitry. Perhaps someone with experience in how these cameras work and their use could explain them, or at least, has seen them often enough to provide us with more information (like for example, they only appear in dim light, or on one kind of CCD chip).

Orb believers are convinced they are some kind of paranormal manifestation that can only be picked up by digital cameras, but that is two separate assumptions: 1) there are paranormal phenomena, and 2) some of them only show up on digital cameras. I only make one assumption: that it is a perfectly natural minor malfunction in a highly complex piece of machinery, certainly not an unreasonable one, and it is one that does not require acceptance of an entire new class of phenomena. Occam's razor: always keep your assumptions to a minimum.

The camera malfunction theory has another advantage: it's testable. If it's true, perhaps we can prove it by finding a way of making it repeat, thereby demonstrating it is a mechanical issue. If we can't provoke it, it might still be true, but it remains an unproven assumption. But if the orbs are some kind of paranormal manifestation, we can never prove it, because we can't create one on demand. It's like saying you've never seen a ghost, believers will always tell you "yes, but some day you MIGHT". You can't argue with that kind of logic.

But there is another, more philosophical reason why I am very skeptical of paranormal phenomena in general. The vast majority of them either hint at the possibility of life after death, or of somehow gatheirnig useful information that will help us, such as predicting the future, or seeing things that are going on far away, or reading minds, etc. These are things we all WANT to believe in because they will be of great benefit to us, which immediately means we can't be very objective about them. As Paul Simon tells us "A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest."