'Invisible UFOs' fill the skies

By Natalie Wolchover

"Why are all the good UFOs invisible?" one Gather.com user asked in response to the latest "invisible UFO" report posted to the site.

You might have thought a defining characteristic of a UFO would be visibility. But thanks to zealous alien hunters doggedly scanning the sky with night-vision cameras, a new class of flying objects that only emit infrared light has emerged from the darkness. Are they spies from the great beyond?

"Some people claim to see actual battles between UFOs up in the sky, using night-vision equipment," the ufologist Robert Sheaffer told Life's Little Mysteries. "Those devices magnify faint objects so much that the sky seems to be filled with invisible UFOs. In reality, of course, they are seeing owls, bats, moths, airplanes, satellites, etc." Night-vision optics trade low resolution for high sensitivity, he explained, so that points of light (such as distant satellites) spill out into circles that make the objects appear huge.

However, some of the invisible UFOs out there really are spies of a sort — or whatever else you choose to call military drones.

Consider, for example, an invisible triangle UFO recently caught on camera by the Laredo Paranormal Research Society, a Texas group. In their footage, captured using an infrared-sensitive third-generation night-vision camera and posted to YouTube July 13, an object composed of three evenly spaced glowing orbs streaked southward across the field of view and disappeared behind the roof of a house.

According to LPRS founder Ismael Cuellar, the "infrared-cloaked" object could not be seen with the naked eye, and cruised silently. "[We] have ruled out birds, bugs, airplanes, helicopters, and even flying drones by comparing them side by side as a point of reference," Cuellar told Life's Little Mysteries. This seems to leave just one explanation: It's a cloaked alien spaceship.

Not so, according to Ben McGee, a geoscientist, aerospace consultant, UFO skeptic and lead field researcher on the National Geographic series "Chasing UFOs." In McGee's opinion, all the signs point to this object being a border patrol drone with infrared anti-collision or identification lights. Here's why he thinks so.

"Nearly one-third of traffic through the nearby Laredo International Airport has historically been military in nature. Laredo is very near to the Mexican border. The military is increasingly using drones to assist with border security, which are small, quiet, and dim (to the naked eye) aircraft," McGee wrote in an email, adding that most drones are also triangular.

This alleged drone oversaturated the camera's infrared sensor. Why? "Particularly with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), anticollision systems are of the utmost importance," he wrote. "One custom UAV lighting manufacturer recently announced custom infrared navigation lights for a major UAV defense contractor. Using these lights in 'constant-on' infrared mode would make the tail, belly, and wingtips extraordinarily bright in infrared, washing out the shape of the aircraft in-between."

And that description pretty closely matches the case.

"In short," McGee said, "high-intensity/close-range infrared lights interacting with a sensitive infrared camera is the problem — turning an aircraft into a triangular blob — rather than the infrared camera being the solution to revealing invisible triangles or pyramids zooming about our airspace."

WATCH VIDEO - Triangle UFO Laredo, Texas

Apple’s Proposed ‘Spaceship’ Campus Comes Alive in New Floor Plans

By Christina Bonnington

Apple has grand plans for a secondary campus in Cupertino, California. The city just released a treasure trove of floor plans, technical drawings, and renderings, so now we can see exactly what Apple has planned.

Construction on Apple’s Campus 2 is expected to begin later this year (pending final approval from Cupertino’s City Council) with construction completing by 2015. The four-story, 300,000 square-foot circular structure, which according to the late Steve Jobs looks "a little like a spaceship landed," will eventually host 13,000 employees.

Apple isn't ditching its corporate headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop, though: The new campus will act as a separate, supplemental research facility to the company’s current campus.

In May, Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer sent area residents a brochure detailing what to expect from the proposed campus. Besides not replacing 1 Infinite Loop, the structure will be LEED certified, with a huge solar array on the main roof.

Campus 2 won’t be open to the public, but it will feature a variety of amenities for its employees, like a fitness center and an auditorium for product events.