Welcome to Star Talk.

Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

And this is Star Talk.

This week our topic is UFOs unidentified flying objects about which so much is written

and so many people think about them and care about them.

And I thought we should bring some sort of physics to the subject or some kind of analysis.

No more speculation.

You know there's thousands of sightings of UFOs every year.

And of course most of them can be explained away as the consequence of natural phenomenon.

Unusual cloud formations or bright planets, lightning, and especially meteorological or astronomical observations.

In some or just spaceships from other worlds visiting, preparing to take this over.

Yeah, okay, there's some would be that.

That's one explanation along with your gas cloud thing.

But what happens is when you see something unfamiliar in the sky, the brain tries to understand it and come to terms with it.

It'll go overboard in doing so.

And so what it doesn't understand, it connects the dots, it invents missing pieces.

And so when you try to judge what an object is or just judge how big it is, your brain fills in the gaps.

And it's the same reason the George Lopez show still on the air.

The brain fills in the gaps making it make sense.

So what happens is our perception about which there's still a lot of research going on in the neuroscience community.

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