Good work by MUFON.
Some hoaxes are bettter than others.
On a fairly still night, you can use plastic grocery bags and a tea-light candle (with a little duct tape to secure the tea light) to make your own UFO’s. As the wax burns away, they get higher. Sometimes it takes some of the wax burning off to get them to fly, i generally scrape half of it out, first.
Oh Come on now!! CRIMINAL CHARGES?? for a harmless goof???
That’s one u(fo)gly perp there...
The first attempt at a hoax appears to be a report filed with MUFON on Jan. 5, 2009. Other hoax dates are Feb. 7 and Feb. 17, 2009. But MUFON called this one correctly on Jan. 7, 2009... The following is D'Antonio's statement on the case from Jan. 7. "I noted that the lights seemed to operate independently, and were brightening and dimming independently, as in a flickering effect, indicative of a typical flame-based light source that I have seen countless times. By flame-based I mean a flying light created by a Chinese Lantern or a flare. A Chinese Lantern, as you already must know, is a paper balloon envelope with a heat source suspended underneath in the opening that heats the envelope making a crude hot air balloon until the flame goes out. Further, in the report, the indication was that the lights went out one by one. This is very telling. When lights go out one-by-one, that usually means that they were LIT one after another. A flare that lasts 20 minutes has burned for 4-5, say by the time the LAST one in the chain is lit, and they are all released if performed by a person or two. So this staggered fadeout pattern is expected in such situations and is what happened in this case. Whether this event was due to Chinese Lanterns, as I thought they could be, or flares, didn't matter actually. It was clear to me after viewing the video that this is not a UFO, but was a man-made hoax event. I informed the STAR team, that in my opinion, this was a man-made event, and not a true UFO of any kind. I suggested obtaining prevailing wind data for that evening and guessing how long the lights were visible, figure out a probable drift pattern and search for debris. The MUFON STAR team, using good science, did a search, and in fact they found debris from the "apparatus" along the path that the object took. So this was a good team effort, with the expected result for a hoax event."Kudos.
No author credit, again?