A recent UFO sighting in Alaska, which was claimed by a self-proclaimed UFO expert to be a damaged alien spacecraft entering an underground base, has been debunked by law enforcement and meteorologists as a misidentification of a plane’s contrail illuminated by the rising sun.
According to news reports, Mattias Ahlvin, a resident of Palmer, Alaska, saw a dark, gray streak in the sky on Thursday morning (April 7) that appeared to be going straight down. He took some photos of the phenomenon and shared them with his wife and local authorities. His wife then posted the photos on a local Facebook page, asking for explanations from other residents.
The photos soon caught the attention of Scott C. Waring, a UFO conspiracy theorist who runs the website UFO Sightings Daily, and who claimed that the “smoke column” was actually a “damaged UFO depending into an entrance on the mountain to enter an underground alien base”. Waring, who has a history of making sensational and unfounded claims about UFOs, posted a video on YouTube to promote his theory.
However, experts have offered a more prosaic explanation for the sighting. Law enforcement officials and a meteorologist with the National Weather Service told the media that the “strange smoke column” was likely a contrail from a plane that was flying at high altitude and at an angle that made it appear vertical. The rising sun’s angle of illumination made the contrail look like a dark, gray streak, which is a common optical illusion in such situations.
While some eyewitnesses may have been puzzled by the unusual appearance of the contrail, it is not uncommon for such phenomena to be mistaken for UFOs or other mysterious objects. In fact, many famous UFO sightings have turned out to be misidentifications of natural or human-made phenomena, such as clouds, balloons, planets, meteors, or satellites.
