Lens Flare and Optical Artifact Explanations
Lens flare and related optical artifacts — internal reflections between lens elements, ghost images of bright sources, sensor floaters, and dust — are recurring prosaic explanations offered for purported UAP imagery. These artifacts are well-recognized in visible-light photography but more easily misread in infrared imagery, where the public has fewer reference cases.
Common artifact patterns
- Ghost images — an off-axis bright source (sun, missile launch flare, runway lights) creates a faint mirrored image in the field of view.
- Floaters — particles on the optical surface that move with sensor motion, appearing as drifting dots.
- Bokeh/diffraction shapes — out-of-focus point sources adopt the shape of the lens aperture (often hexagonal).
- Lens-element reflections — bright sources produce arrays of secondary spots that translate consistently with sensor pan.
In the May 2026 PURSUE discourse
mick-west’s Metabunk thread on pursue Release 01 (src-metabunk-pursue-analysis-2026-05) attributes several PURSUE images to lens artifacts — most prominently PR-48, where contributor John J. argued multiple “object” features track with sensor motion as expected of lens-element reflections plus floaters on the optical surface. The same thread distinguishes between “object” (presupposing 3D morphology) and “area of contrast” (the sensor-faithful descriptor for IR features) — relevant when the brightness feature in question is more plausibly an optical artifact than a real-world object.
Sensor-modality bias
A key argument from skeptics: the public is broadly trained to recognize lens flare in visible-light imagery, but the same physics in IR is unfamiliar — making IR artifacts more likely to be read as anomalous.