BUILD YOUR OWN UFO BINO-SCOPE UNIT
TURN YOUR BINOCULARS INTO A
UFO-SCOPE.
Something wehave always wondered regarding UFO sightings.
Say its night, and you see a light in the distant sky. Is
it really an airplane? Or suppose it's behaving oddly, performing
maneuvers impossible for an aircraft, etc. Could the optical
emissions coming from that object be identical to an ordinary
120V AC lightbulb? Specifically, is the LIGHT AMPLITUDE of
that object pure and smooth DC? Or is it some kind of AC white
noise or signal?
After all, nearly all manmade light sources are modulated
as a result of their AC power supplies, so their brightness
is vibrating with 120Hz audio frequency. Connect a solar cell
to an audio amplifier, hold it under an incandescent bulb,
and you'll hear MMMMMMMMMM at 120Hz (two flashes per 60Hz
cycle.) Therefor we should ask: what sort of vibration might
be imposed on those distant and mysterious lights in the sky?
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We taped a selenium solar cell to the eyepiece of a small
50X telescope, routed it to an audio amplifier, then pointed
it at distant light sources at night while listening to the
signal.
Incandescent
streetlights give a deep hum, their AC light output is a pure
120hz sine wave.
Mercury and sodium vapor bulbs
are nonlinear, they give a complex 120hz waveform.
Neon signs sound different,
with a squealy high frequency buzz component to their 120hz
fundamental.
Automobile headlights are DC,
so we never tried viewing them.
Headlights are modulated by car vibrations, so we checked
it out and yes, car headlights give off a continuous soft
gonging sound even on smooth highways. Their filaments vibrate,
and different types of headlights give different pitches of
"bell" sounds.
Aircraft strobes are easy to detect as a loud clicking. Other
aircraft lights *may* have a standard 800Hz modulation (from
their 400Hz supplies), but we found that it wasn't loud enough
to hear from distant aircraft lights. Perhaps the thermal
inertia of their filaments tends to filter out all the high
frequencies, whereas 60Hz is slow enough to be "broadcast"
by light bulb filaments. Maybe with a low-noise detector and
some bandpass filtering, the 800Hz of aircraft lights could
be sensed.

SCHEMATIC OF UFO-SCOPE UNIT |
Rather than
using a telescope and a solar cell, we put together a
better viewer recently. Binoculars can provide a parallel
"sighting scope," even when one eyepiece is
occupied by a photocell. A Seimens BPW33 P.I.N. photodiode
and a low-noise opamp front end gives a bit more gain
than a selenium cell. Headphones give much better low
frequency response than a speaker. And the whole thing
can be battery-powered and duct-taped onto a set of large-aperature
nighttime binoculars. Any light source seen by your eye
through one side of the binocs will be heard as optically
demodulated audio picked up by the other side! |
NEXT
WE WILL LOOK AT DIFFERENT TYPES OF UFO-SCOPE YOU CAN BUILD
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