floaters and UFOs

[Belgian thought]

Hello been away a while.

My son, who is now in his teens, told me of an event in Summer 2008, Hamburg, Germany, whereby he said that he, and his friends saw UFOs. I asked him when etc.. and I suggested that what he saw were magic lanterns - these seem to create more and more common UFO sightings nowadays due to the popularity.
We discussed this whilst sitting in the garden, he went back indoors, my daughter was watching something on TV, and I looked up at the sky. My eyes focused into the dark sky - we live in the country, whereupon I saw a light going from my right to the left and then move upwards rapidly.
I did not believe that I had witnessed anything special, and checked out the surroundings. I noted that the TV which my daughter was watching, reflected against our window and was at an angle to my sight i.e. right eye-ball – whereupon I asked myself whether that reflection might have hit on a floater – ‘Floaters are tiny clumps of material that are floating in the fluid inside the eye’ Source - http://www.school-for-champions.com/health/floaters.htm (http://www.school-for-champions.com/health/floaters.htm).
Floaters tend to move in haphazard ways, but in my personal experience they have often moved in a seemingly horizontal plane, and then change directions and moved upwards – which I presume is due to shape of the eye i.e. a sphere.
My point are as follows
1), If light hits a floater at a particular angle, by refraction it can become visible – that is why we see them.
2), If seeing them coincides with looking up at the sky, whereby the floater becomes the only point of focus, the movement of that floater is exaggerated with reference to said sky, i.e. the movement of that floater, which might be less than one sixteen’s of an eyeball, projected, moves one sixteen’s of the sky, giving the appearance of a very fast moving object, hence he appearance of an UFO having amazing abilities in changing direction etc.. I have tried to locate information regarding the illusion effect of floaters, to no avail, but think that there may be merit to my above suggestion as to how many UFO sightings may occur. I would appreciate any thoughts.

[Bikewer]

Being "of an age", I experience these frequently. From my own experience, the floaters are implicitly tied to head/eye movement, with immediate input effects. It's hard to imagine someone mistaking these for outside objects, though I suppose it's possible.

[shuttlt]

Equally you wouldn't expect people to mistake the moon for a UFO, but if other recent threads are to be believed, people do. Seeing a UFO is a pretty low probability event, so unlikely things like this could easily cause a significant number.

[Belgian thought]

That is interesting what you say about movement of the head. Often when people record their experiences, they state something in the region of ‘I looked up at the sky and saw this and that..’, implying the movement of the head, and then witnessing the event.

[Crowlogic]

I suffer from floaters in my left eye. I've learned to recgonize how and when they move. Always they appear as a series of dark translusant patches that start at the top of the eye ans settle down to the bottom to become invisible. While I've never seen a flying saucer I have seen several UFO's in the form of nocturnal lights in the sky. A number of these were seen during star parties when I engaged in amature astronomy. Not a chance in hell that a floater could mistaken for a nocturnal light. On more than one occasion we were able to get some decent optics on the lights which showed up only as moving bright well defined points of light. In those days virtually every airplane we ever got the optic on revealed itself to be an airplane regardless of altitude.