A useful UAP observer isn't someone who sees more — it's someone who can rule out more. Nine of every ten reports filed at Sighted resolve to something with a name. Once you can recognize the ordinary, the genuinely anomalous becomes visible.
Here's the basic catalog of what's normal in the night sky, organized roughly by how often it triggers a report.
The brightest objects — planets
Venus is the single most common source of "bright stationary UAP" reports. It's the third-brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon. Around dusk or dawn it can be visible while the rest of the sky is dim enough to make it look anomalously bright. It twinkles less than stars because it's a disc, not a point source, which is the same reason it sometimes appears to "hover." Jupiter and Mars are next on the list — Jupiter for its brightness, Mars for its color.
Any planetarium app — Stellarium, Sky Guide, Night Sky — will tell you in two taps whether a planet is in the part of the sky you're looking at.
Satellites — the ISS, Starlink trains, and dim flares
The International Space Station moves in a clean east-to-west arc, very bright (around magnitude -3), and takes four to six minutes to cross the visible sky. It doesn't blink, doesn't change color, and doesn't stop. Pass times are published — Heavens-Above.com and the NASA Spot The Station app are reliable.
Starlink trains are the most common satellite-related UAP source today. Within a few hours of a launch, twenty or more identical points appear in a straight line, evenly spaced, moving together at the same speed. They look unmistakable once you've seen one, and there's been at least one train visible from most of North America almost every week for the last several years.
Iridium flares — bright glints from older satellites — are mostly gone since 2019, but a small number of other constellations occasionally produce similar flashes lasting five to twenty seconds.
Aircraft at high altitude
Commercial jets at cruising altitude (around 35,000 feet) show a steady white nav light, a red light on the left wingtip, a green light on the right, and a strobe. They move predictably along great-circle routes. If you can see all of those lights, it's a plane.
Pull up FlightRadar24 or ADS-B Exchange and look at the same point in the sky. If the trajectory matches, you can rule it out within thirty seconds. The exceptions are military aircraft — they often broadcast no transponder data — which is why MOA (Military Operating Area) overlap matters when interpreting reports.
Meteors and re-entries
A meteor lasts one to three seconds. Anything longer than that is not a meteor. Period.
Re-entering debris — spent rocket stages, satellites at end of life — can streak across the sky for thirty seconds or more, often fragmenting visibly. The American Meteor Society logs both and is a reliable cross-reference. If you saw a long, slow streak that broke apart, check their event database before filing.
Atmospheric optics
Sundogs, light pillars, halos, lenticular clouds, and noctilucent clouds are all responsible for sighting reports that read like UAPs in the moment and become obvious in retrospect. Lenticular clouds in particular — smooth, lens-shaped, often stationary — are mistaken for craft constantly. Atmospheric Optics (atoptics.co.uk) maintains a catalog of examples worth bookmarking.
Drones
Commercial drones, mostly DJI-class, are responsible for an increasing share of low-altitude sightings. They typically have a green, red, and white light in fixed positions, hover precisely, and operate below 400 feet AGL. If what you're looking at is below the tree line and silent, drone is the first thing to rule out.
What's left
After ruling out planets, satellites, aircraft, meteors, atmospheric optics, and drones, the residual category — what investigators call "true unknowns" — is small but real. That's what Sighted exists to track.
Your job as an observer is to get the report into that residual category cleanly, so investigators don't waste their time discounting things you could have ruled out at the source. Knowing the ordinary is the first step.