There are reasons it takes a clear head and a tight control over one's emotions in order to accurately and successfully investigate unusual lights and objects in the sky. For the serious UFO hunter it is every bit as important to find proof of a sighting as having a normal, natural cause as it is to find proof of an extra terrestrial nature. Objectivity is the keyword to showing the skeptics that the research is sound and accurate so the investigator’s credibility becomes undeniable. A case for this is in the recent investigation of the lights over Lake Erie.

The first reports were of nightly sightings out over the Lake of lights that seemed to hover for awhile before slowly moving off. Being so close to major population centers, the media, beginning with Fox News out of Cleveland and quickly being picked up by the MSNBC Network, quickly popularized the story and spread it around the world. Despite there being no great amazing details, merely that the lights were appearing in the same places and performing the same maneuvers on a nightly basis, MUFON realized it needed to investigate since there was so much interest in the accounts. They had their suspicions from the start that what was being seen was a misidentification of normal aircraft behavior.

Ohio Mutual UFO Network investigator Tom Wertman went on the case. Beginning at the site of the initial reports he coordinated with the witness and began a mutual observation with timeframe checks and a comparison software program that kept up with commercial airplane flights into and out of the Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport in real-time updates. By the end of the night, three sets of lights, which the witness attested to were what he had been seeing nightly, had all matched up to incoming aircraft as they swung out over Lake Erie before coming in toward the landing field.

In conclusion, the report demonstrated that distance and angle of flight were responsible for the misidentification of possible UFO traffic. As the planes were moving away or toward the area they seemed to hover. As they were flying low and slow, the small variation in intensity was nearly impossible to detect. Only as the planes made their curve around to begin their landing approach would the lights seem to begin moving across the sky.

Such misidentification of ordinary aircraft is a common problem for UFO investigators, especially when the media hypes the story without investigating it first. To prevent such occurrences from diminishing the importance of real unknown sightings it is critical to educate the public to the types of behavior of lights in the sky that are explainable. However much a believer in UFO activity may want to witness a touch of the mysterious, it is necessary to be able to rule out all the mundane possibilities first. Only then can serious research be directed at the things in our sky that fail to be proven as a normal occurrence. Only then will the population at large begin to realize that ufologists are seeking the truth behind the phenomena rather than the sensationalism of the unknown.