Venus can look surprisingly close when it’s very bright or on its closest approaches to earth.
from StartsWithABang, an astrophysics blog
But just how much can you deduce about the UFO-Venus identification problem in the length of time it takes to enjoy a beer on the back deck on a warm evening? Just one beer, mind.
The planet Venus is sometimes very bright in the night sky, so bright it can be easy to believe it’s something much closer.
We are beneath a high traffic flight route here, so some days literally hundreds of airliners pass overhead. At night they appear as tiny clusters of colored lights far up in the sky. In my mind I was comparing how Venus looked at that moment, to the visible size of an airliner like a 747. I was doing this because I was amazed just how bright and large Venus looked then.I was standing on my back deck a few days ago looking at Venus which at that moment was not too far over the rooftops. It was a clear night and, possibly because it was relatively low in the sky and magnified by the atmosphere, Venus looked very bright.
I realized that, if Venus had in fact been an object at about 30,000 to 50,000 feet altitude, it would have easily been three to five times the size of a large passenger jet. And at the time I was looking at it, Venus was much, much brighter than any airliner’s running lights are.
We also have a medivac helicopter pass near and over us often. The hospital helipad is not far from here. Venus was brighter than some of the medivac chopper’s lights, but not as bright as its forward “headlight.”
This all made me realize how it wouldn’t be that hard to think Venus was something right here, in our atmosphere, rather than a planet far away. Of course that assumes you don’t know about Venus in the first place. The difference being, in my case, my reaction was; “Holy crap look how bright Venus is tonight!” But someone who was not as interested in night skies might just say “Holy crap what is that huge light in the sky?”
Conversely, I have to note that I’ve heard Venus suggested as an explanation for sightings of objects (if accurate and true) that were obviously not things you could mistake Venus for.
At any rate, this speculation lasted just long enough to have a beer on the deck during our first warm evening. I should also note that over ten beers on the deck can lead to a wider margin in identification errors.
Reproduced from UFORecovery.com by permission