Venus

Human beings and other higher life forms are patterned to be aware of the unusual and to ignore the usual. Were it otherwise, an individual could not cope with the huge amount of information the eyes and other sensors can present to the mind.

It bothers no one that the sun comes up each morning and that it goes down each night--except for those fortunates who live at high latitude. Nor do the monthly comings and goings of the moon and its apparent changes in shape bother people. In fact, the moon's 28-day cycle has served as a familiar and useful calendar through the ages.

But let there be a total eclipse of the sun. The sudden unexpected disappearance of the sun often causes terror and concern that the world's end has finally come.

More regular and less spectacular, but still sometimes leading to concern and confusion, is the highly variable appearance of the planet Venus--the brightest and most conspicuous planet.

Venus spends most of its time far from the earth, up to 160 million miles away. When distant, Venus is comparatively dim and mostly forgotten. But every 584 days--a year and seven months--Venus approaches the earth, and its apparent brightness increases. Confusingly, Venus appears first as a bright "evening star." Then 72 days after being brightest in the evening, it becomes brightest as a "morning star." This duality led the Greeks to give Venus two names--Phosphorus in evening and Hesperus in morning. When brightest, Venus is 38° from the sun and is crescent-shaped like the moon near the time of new moon. The light seen is, of course, like that from the moon, reflected sunlight.

Almost every time Venus approaches the earth and shows its brightest face, there are new UFO reports. A person looks up in the evening or morning sky and is startled to see an extremely bright object that was not there the last time he looked, a few days or weeks earlier, and he has forgotten that the object was there many months ago. Furthermore, a bright light in the sky such as Venus, stared at long enough, often gives the impression of motion, sometimes making it difficult to believe that one is seeing our closest planetary neighbor, still several tens of millions of miles distant.