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Curiously, most of the sundogs I've seen have been longer than they are tall, perhaps due to stratification in the clouds they appear in. Circumzenithal arcs appear almost directly overhead, so they don't fit this sighting at all.

That's right, and this is one reason why I am hopeful for the long term future of humanity. Fossil fuels have a limited timespan of usefulness, while solar-based sources of energy will continue to be useful for billions of years. We can divide the resources that can be extracted from planets...

They were also described as hazy. This suggests to me that a solar reflection of some kind was involved, rather than refraction or diffraction, which could have produced a rainbow effect.

The Sundog explanation is also discussed in the Clarke/Shough report. It also mentions several different parhelia phenomenon, the 'subsun', and 3rd and 4th order rainbows. These are also largely ruled out. Perhaps a reflected sunbeam from the greenhouses might have caused a small arc rainbow...

The factor 'L' is one of the biggest uncertainties in the Drake equation. Once an advanced civilisation has colonies on several planets, or has constructed life-supporting structures around several stars, they might be immune from economic or catastrophic collapse for millions, or billions of...

Well, the quote you gave says he was familiar with direct reflection, which would have a critical angle for visibility. I'm talking about reflection onto a thin, hazy cloud, which would scatter light in all directions and have a much wider range of visibility. This possibility is mentioned in...

The report by Baure, Clarke, Fuller and Shough came up with a list of explanations of varying plausibilities, but one good explanation in that list is a reflection from Alderney's greenhouses onto a thin layer of haze in the air. If the sunlight from the greenhouses was particularly intense...

This clip was filmed from inside a cockpit, apparently with curved glass. Perhaps the second speck is a reflection of the first, showing the object as it retreats behind the plane. I note that there are a number of other hazy reflections in the glass, which might be reflections of clouds...

On an Earth-like planet with forests on the surface, too much oxygen would increase the risk of fire considerably, reducing the production of oxygen by photosynthesis. So there may be an upper limit on the amount of oxygen that can persist on worlds similar to ours. The maximum level of oxygen...

To a drone operator, a free-floating balloon looks something like an enemy drone, or an undifferentiated UAP. This could draw the attention away from any other activity on the ground. This does require that the locals have a supply of balloons ready to release when a drone appears, but this...

I suspect that these spheres are a kind of reactively low-tech spoofing, using inert balloons to simply draw the drone pilot's attention. I don't know how quickly they could get them up there, though.

The fact that the occupants of UFOs are described as a wide range of beings could be considered consistent with the appearance of humans from the future. In a few centuries or so, humanity may well adopt a wide range of genetic and physiological modifications, perhaps as adaptations to exotic...

Note that superearths only appear to be more common than Earth-sized planets (and smaller planets) because they are easier to detect. We don't know the real statistics yet.

If you continually bring mass/energy from the future into the past, you are increasing the current mass/energy of the universe; do this too much and too often, and you could cause a Big Crunch. Not recommended.

My own speculation is that these balloons are simply released to confuse the drone operators, drawing attention away from any other activity on the ground. A cheap and apparently effective ploy.

Here is a piece of idle speculation. We've seen similar spheres in two drone videos now. Even though the full Mosul clip has not yet been made public, it looks very similar to this one. Perhaps these are normal, toy balloons intended to act as distractions: every time a drone comes over someone...

The only other interesting data we have is that the Pentagon does not consider that this sphere exhibited any anomalous movements. That suggests that their analysis either shows that it is not moving in any significant way, or that it is moving in a way that is consistent with human technology.

I thought that at first, but I think they are there, but just quite subtle. I'd guess that the Reaper is flying at a few thousand feet, and parallax effects would be quite difficult to see at that distance. If the balloon is more than half as high as the drone, then the parallax-induced...

The footage was shot on July 12, 2022 from an American MQ-9 Reaper drone; this information seems to have come straight from Sean Kirkpatrick.

Since this was a Reaper drone, it must have been moving at some speed, presumably the minimum speed available for the conditions. The Reaper is described as having a cruising speed of 150kph, or 93mph; we have to adjust for windspeed, but it was almost certainly moving with respect to the...