You’re out on your deck watching the stars in the sky and wondering if there really can be life on other planets when all of a sudden there it is! There’s something in the sky. It has running lights, it’s zipping around, it appeared as if out of nowhere… you can’t seem to identify it, it’s flying, it’s… an object… it’s…
…your neighbor’s RC plane. Bummer!
Some sightings of UFOs may actually be attributed to a radio controlled flying gizmo of some kind. So, how can you be certain that what you’re about to report is an actual UFO or just your neighbor’s new favorite toy?

RC blimps and flying saucers come in various sizes and shapes. Some of them are tiny and may not be easily seen from far distances. Here are some ways to help yourself determine if that UFO you’re seeing in the night sky is really just an RC plane.
It might be radio controlled if…

You hear a buzzing noise as that of a tiny motor.
If you don’t hear a buzzing sound then you might just be at too great of a distance.

You can see it has an antenna.
On some models of flying RC’s you may not see a visible antenna. You can’t just assume it’s not radio controlled just because there’s no antenna. But, if you do see one then there’s a good chance that what you’re seeing is actually just a flying RC toy.

You find someone near you with a joy stick.
Now this is a big telltale sign of it being radio controlled and not unidentified; if someone a few yards away from you is holding a joy stick, you can probably make a pretty safe bet that what’s buzzing around above your head is definitely not unidentified.

It keeps flying around the same area.
Most RC gadgets have a range of about 100 yards, but not much farther than that. If you notice that the UFO you’re witnessing is just flying around in the same spot, you’re probably not seeing a UFO at all.

It hovers in place but doesn’t zip around.
Okay, so you can rule out the RC plane theory on this one. While RC planes may not be able to hover, an RC helicopter or blimp does exactly that. The trick is to notice if it’s at slow speeds or if it’s hovering and then zipping around.

It doesn’t seem to go very high.
It’s just a fact that an RC toy cannot fly but a few hundred feet in the air. If it’s something higher than that, you’ve got a good case for the UFO files.

It shows up over your neighbor’s yard.
Knock on your neighbor’s door and ask.

If after going completely through this checklist you still have not identified it, then it is obviously unidentified. You can now take all of those pictures and videos to your local new station and get this information out to the world.

On March 10, the Cleveland Fox affiliate aired a feature detailing Eugene Erlikh’s repeated UFO sightings: For six straight nights, Erlikh had seen the same cluster of lights over Lake Erie. On the last night, he had the presence of mind to videotape their appearance, capturing their pulsating beams and changing colours. Erlikh also had the good sense to enlist the support of a corroborating witness, his close friend Nick Hausen, who also saw the lights, confessing, “I have never seen anything like that.”

The Fox Cable Network picked-up the story, which spread to CNN and through the networks to hundreds of local stations. Erlikh told the Cleveland Fox-8 reporter who broke the story, “Once you see it with your own eyes, you’re gonna say ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’ And why do they keep coming back to the same spot?”

Not surprisingly, NASA, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Canadian Coast Guard said they had received no other reports of sightings. At the Cleveland Ufology Project, self-styled UFO experts scrutinized Erlikh’s video, concluding inconclusively. Richard Lee, unofficial spokesperson for the Ufology Project, said the video was too rough, grainy, and unsteady to be of any use to scientists. As the story attracted national attention, however, other UFO sighters reported similar phenomena, and observers detected hints of a trend.

Distinctive lights frequently reported nationwide, worldwide.
Three words recur in recent UFO sightings from across North America and Europe—“pulsating,” “string,” and “orange.” Many reports closely resembling Erlikh’s describe brilliant strings of lights flying in precision formations and complex patterns, and a few other videographers have captured images like those on Erlikh’s footage.

On December 15, 2009, a husband and wife in O’Fallon, Missouri, observed and documented a string of bright, pulsating lights in the western sky. Two days later, in Springerville, Arizona, near the site of some history’s most famous UFO incidents, two US Air Force veterans reported seeing a string of lights and then an exceptionally bright flash in the eastern sky. They said the flash covered at least 10% of the sky, leaving “a pronounced after-image.” On February 14, 2010, nearly twenty different witnesses spread across six British cities reported “an orange fireball travelling in a perfect line north-northeast [in] complete silence.” Later that night, several witnesses reported the same phenomenon over Dublin, Ireland.

Scientists neither confirm nor deny.
Noting the consistency among the reports, and also noting that they could see no sign of collusion among the reporters, space scientists nevertheless offered their usual response. Experts acknowledged that they cannot definitively identify or explain the phenomenon, and they agreeing that the series of reports breaks from most historical observations of unidentified spacecraft. Yet astronomers showed restraint in their comments. “We remain neutral and disinterested as we examine these phenomena,” said one southern California researcher, “and we agree that all explanations fall into the realm of plausibility. We try, however, to look at the explanations most probable and then most possible. While decidedly intriguing, none of these observations defies explanation by the capabilities of man-made aircraft.”