Rods: Flying Absurdities
Do these invisible flying creatures really exist?
Filed under Aliens & UFOs, Cryptozoology
| Skeptoid #03 October 19, 2006 Podcast transcript | Listen | Subscribe Also available in Japanese |
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By Brian Dunning, Skeptoid Podcast
Episode
03 , October 19, 2006
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/
4004
From the cryptozoology files, we're going to look today at rods, those magical, mystical living UFO's that inhabit the invisible shadowlands of Earth.
Rods are said to be flying creatures, from a few inches to a few feet in length, that are invisible to humans, but visible to cameras, both film and digital, both still and video. Their bodies are shaped like long thin rods, and their only appendages are wavy wings, one on each side, stretching the full length of their bodies. They move through the air by undulating these wings, like eels swimming through water.
A gentleman named Jose Escamilla claims to be the discoverer of rods. On his web site, Roswellrods.com, he says that he first captured rods on video in 1994. He says he was taping UFO's when he accidentally filmed the rods as well. Since Mr. Escamilla did not recall seeing any such thing in person while he was taping, he decided the most likely explanation for his video is that he'd discovered a new species of flying creature that is invisible to humans, and only shows up on film or video.
Since then, innumerable photographs and videos have surfaced that purport to show rods. Search the Internet, and you'll find hundreds of them.
If rods are as ubiquitous as it would seem they are, why is their existence not generally accepted? Justification for the existence of rods requires that four basic claims be proven or at least shown to be reasonable:
- There should be zoological precedences for the existence of undiscovered insects up to a meter in length. New species are being discovered all the time, so I think we should grant this one. It's certainly possible that there are undiscovered flying creatures a meter in length.
- We must accept the existence of creatures that are invisible, although they're up to a meter in length and perhaps up to several inches wide. Discounting microscopic organisms, the natural world offers no better than transparency, such as that found in some species of jellyfish. Transparency is not invisibility. Supporters of rods have not proven that invisibility in the animal kingdom is possible, and they will need to do so by presenting an invisible animal.
- Certain images must be visible only in the output of all types of visible wavelength cameras, but not visible to the naked eye. When cameras output their images to the final medium, be it film, paper, or a video screen, we see their output because our eyes see the same visible wavelengths that were recorded and output. We're not talking about thermographic or other non-visible-wavelength camera technologies here, so rod supporters will need to prove that all standard cameras can convert certain invisible wavelengths into visible ones, without affecting the visible wavelengths; which is something those cameras were not designed to do. Only with this proof can it be reasonably accepted that it's possible for a camera to see something that was invisible to the photographer.
- Even if all of the above can be substantiated, there needs to be a lack of a more likely explanation. If a simple procedure can be shown to easily reproduce the appearance of rods on camera, then we haven't even established that there is a phenomenon to be investigated.
As you might expect, there is indeed an alternate explanation, and a simple procedure to take a picture showing rods. Picture yourself standing with the sun at your back, facing a large shaded area, such as the shaded entrance to a cave. Dragonflies (or other insects) are flying everywhere, darting back and forth at around 20mph, which is about 29 feet per second (dragonflies can hit 60mph). Take a photograph, with a common shutter speed of 1/30th of a second. In that time, the dragonfly will travel about 12 inches. Because your exposure is set for the dark background, the path traced by the dragonfly's transit will be overexposed and will appear solid white. The dragonfly will make one full wingbeat in in that time (some insects would beat their wings twenty times in 1/30th of a second), so the path described by its wingtip on your film image would be one full sine wave period, twelve inches long. There would be one of these sine waves down each side of the twelve-inch-long rod shaped track traced by the dragonfly's moving body.
This phenomenon is so common that most any professional photographer can tell you about being plagued by it while trying to take outdoor photographs or video in similar lighting conditions. Nevertheless, the resulting image is strange enough that someone not familiar with photography basics might conclude that the subject in the photograph was in fact twelve inches long with undulating wings, and the photographer would be absolutely correct in stating that he did not see any twelve inch long flying creatures with his naked eye.
The conclusion from all this is that rods are a well known, well established, and well understood byproduct of photography. The proposed alternate explanation, that they are an unknown and invisible lifeform only seen by cameras, requires that some pretty outrageous claims about invisibility and photography be proven. Until they are, or until a rod is captured and can be studied, I see no reason to suspect that such things might exist.
© 2006 Skeptoid Media, Inc.
References & Further Reading
Alexander, David E. Nature's Flyers: Birds, Insects and the Biomechanics of Flight. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 89.
Escamilla, Jose. "About Roswell Rods." Roswell Rods. Roswell Rods, 16 Jan. 2008. Web. 31 Oct. 2009. <http://www.roswellrods.com/story.html>
Island, Kal. "Hey, What's all the Bugaboo?" Popular Science. 1 Nov. 1995, Volume 247, Number 5: 83.
Kaku, Michu. Physics of the Impossible, a Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel. New York: Doubleday, 2008. 16-33.
Sol. "Conclusion: Escamilla's "rods" are motion-blurred bugs." Sol's 'Rods' Study. Opendb, 8 Apr. 1998. Web. 9 Dec. 2009. <http://opendb.com/sol/conclusion.htm>
Reference this article:
Dunning, Brian.
"Rods: Flying Absurdities." Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, Inc.,
19 Oct 2006. Web.
4 Feb 2012. <http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4004>
Discuss!
5 most recent comments | Show all 52 comments
Remember, you should always read with skepticism the comments of anyone too lame to put their real name & city.
"Flying rods" are an accepted phenomenon among the more stupid folk of our society.
Jon, Felville
July 28, 2011 9:12am
Brian,
You concede point 1, that new species exist to be found.
Other posters have pointed out that CCD cameras do show non-visible wavelengths (near IR) as visible output, so that addresses point 3.
Finally, to address requirement 2, there has been at least one well documented large invisible creature, namely the invisible pink unicorn.
Time for a retraction?
Russell, New Orleans
September 11, 2011 5:51am
Why do we need to prove rods exist? They are artifacts of photography not a new species. You might as well pretend "orbs" are ghosts...
Oh. Wait a second...
Tom H, Kent, UK
September 11, 2011 9:16am
"Rods" Such nonsense. The History Channel actually had an episode of MonsterQuest discussing this "phenomena" While watching it, all I was seeing was insects. It was so obvious. Don't get me wrong, I like a good mystery as much as anyone but rods are just pure rubbish. Oh, I mean pure insect.
Mike, Lakeside CA
November 16, 2011 9:50am
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All of this is just a rehash of Trevor James Constable's bizarre theory, put forward in the 1950s, that UFOs are actually flying animals normally visible only in infrared wavelengths that have been here all along, but have been provoked into increased activity by the invention of radar, which stirs them up in some way.
Similarly, Constable's "critters" (his own term for them), though invisible to human eyes, except when they're angry, can be detected as amoeboid blobs on photos taken of random bits of sky with infrared film.
The ease with which digital cameras can take infrared photos without the need to buy expensive special film that you have to keep in the fridge, otherwise it develops random imperfections (which, by an amazing coincidence, look a lot like amoeboid "critters"), means that this notion has experienced a slight resurgence lately.
The problem is not that this is any more far-fetched than the usual space-alien explanations for UFOs. It's that the kind of people who believe things not for any logically compelling reason, but just because they want to, would much rather believe in extraterrestrial visitors than squidgy blobs, so it's never really caught on in a big way, despite being no sillier than the alternatives.
By the way, Constable got the idea in the first place from a story called "The Horror Of The Heights", written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1913, which you can read here:
http://www.literaturepage.com/read/tales-of-terror-and-mystery-1.html
The Urban Spaceman, Edinburgh, Scotland
July 26, 2011 7:03am