On 2 July 1952 Navy chief petty officer Delbert Newhouse was driving through Utah with his family, stopped, and filmed a dozen bright objects moving erratically high in the sky. Newhouse was a Navy photographer with thousands of hours behind a camera, which is what made the film matter. The Navy laboratory at Anacostia measured the brightness frame by frame and concluded the objects were neither aircraft nor birds. The Robertson Panel revisited it in 1953 and said: seagulls. Newhouse maintained to the end that before he got the camera out he had seen the objects closer, and that they were discs. The film sits in the archives as a case where the experts differed not over the data but over how to read it.

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Kanas and the Lights over the Mountain Lake

A glacial lake in the far north of Xinjiang, near where the borders of China, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia meet. It is known in China for two things: a lake monster, which is almost certainly a large taimen, and steady reports of lights over the water. The latter increased noticeably in the 2000s, when a road was put in and tourism arrived. The explanation here is largely geographical: the lake lies away from developed country, the air is clean, and launches from Russian and Chinese ranges regularly pass over the mountains, their upper-atmosphere trails visible for hundreds of kilometres and looking exactly as described.