UFO sightings over Washington – is our smart tech tricking us more than ever or are “they” really here?

Depending on your view of the UFO (or UAP to use the trendy, less-tainted vernacular) “scene”, the strange lights appearing over the Capitol building in Washington DC this week have caused an international stir, with news outlets the world over-reporting the potential phenomena.

Only a few days ago I watched the hearings at the Oversight Committee – actual Governmental-level debate around what UAPs could actually be, as a swathe of high-level witnesses proclaimed to know things our Governments are keeping from us. Somewhere, Mulder was sitting at home with a smile on his face watching the TV.

Regardless of what may or may not be going on, not only at a Governmental level but potentially an interstellar one too, the lights over DC have thrown up some interesting arguments.

‘The picture is clearly a glare reflection off of the lens of the camera of the street lights below it,’ argued a former paranormal investigator, Average Chris. ‘Same spacing, just inverted pattern.”

It’s true many streetlights have been changed over the last few years to brighter, LED lamps that last longer and react differently when imaged. Not to cause drama, but to save towns and cities money

Whether the explanation above is or is not the case, and it is by far from “clear” it is as the lights were imaged from many locations and glare doesn’t really work like that – see the video on X below – many of us have probably witnessed anomalies of our own when taking photos with our smartphones.

My iPhone 15 Pro Max has a strange tendency to include a row of green dots on photos at night for no obvious reason. It’s ruined some great pics and if I was taking a nighttime image of the Capital building and then posting a row of green lights above the Hill it could garner the same excitement as what we have seen over the last day or so.

But is it that simple? Air Force pilots have reported seeing “craft” that could not be from this planet pulling crazy G-Force moves that no human would be able to survive, at least with the tech we know we currently have.

Again – weather phenomena, tricks of the light, and so on are the mundane explanations for this stuff to make those suggesting otherwise look like nothing more than the village idiot.

This kind of high-level event probably can’t be explained away by lower-quality consumer tech not playing nice with the night sky, but as now everybody has a camera in their pocket and potentially capturing photos that could show something that simply isn’t there, we need to be more careful than ever not to muddy the waters further.