“Rods,” also called air rods, skyfish or solar entities, are long, thin shapes with ripple-like bulges along their sides that streak across photographs and video too fast to see with the naked eye. In the 1990s some enthusiasts claimed they were an unknown form of life living in the atmosphere. Unlike most cryptids, the mystery has been tested and solved: rods are a camera artifact, produced when a flying insect crosses the frame faster than the camera can freeze it.[1][2][3]
| Other names | Rods, skyfish, solar entities |
|---|---|
| Type | Photographic and video artifact; claimed as an aerial life form |
| First popularized | José Escamilla, Roswell, New Mexico, 19 March 1994 |
| Seen with the naked eye | No; only in recordings |
| Explanation | Motion blur of insects (and sometimes birds) during camera exposure |
| Key test | Chinese television investigation in Jilin Province, 2005 |
How rods became famous
The idea is usually traced to José Escamilla, a musician and filmmaker, who said that on 19 March 1994 he recorded strange, fast-moving objects while trying to film a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico. He went on to record many more, sold videos and lectured about rods as possible living creatures.[1]
The timing matters. Rods became a phenomenon in the 1990s, when affordable camcorders put video cameras in millions of hands and frame-by-frame playback made it easy to find shapes that no one saw at the time. One widely shared clip was filmed at the Cave of Swallows (Sótano de las Golondrinas) in Mexico, a huge open pit full of birds and insects.[2]
Why insects turn into rods
Video cameras record a series of still frames, each exposed for a short time. The explanation, given to skeptic Robert Todd Carroll by the entomologist Doug Yanega, depends on two numbers:[1][4]
- Exposure time. If an insect crosses a large part of the frame while the shutter is open, it is smeared into a long streak, the “body” of the rod.
- Wingbeat frequency. Insects beat their wings many times per second. Each wingbeat during the exposure leaves a slight bulge along the streak, producing the regular ripples or “fins” that make rods look alive.
Because the streak is a record of the insect’s path, rods often appear to be several feet long and moving at impossible speeds. Their real size and speed are those of a moth or fly passing close to the lens.
The 2005 experiment
In August 2005, China Central Television aired a two-part documentary about rods caught on surveillance cameras at the Tonghua Zhenguo Pharmaceutical Company in Jilin Province. The footage looked just like Escamilla’s. To test it, investigators stretched large nets across the area where the cameras recorded rods. The cameras went on showing rods flying into the nets, but when the nets were checked, they held only moths and other ordinary insects. The program concluded that the rods were an optical illusion created by insects moving faster than the camera settings could capture.[2][5]
Doing the arithmetic
The insect explanation can be checked with simple numbers. Standard-definition camcorders of the 1990s, the cameras that made rods famous, recorded about 60 fields per second in North America. Under ordinary settings each field was exposed for around 1/60 of a second, and longer in dim light. Now take some typical wingbeat rates:[7]
- A large white butterfly beats its wings about 12 times a second. In a 1/60-second exposure that is a fraction of one wingbeat, so it shows up as a short blur with no ripples. That is why rods are rarely reported from butterflies.
- A hummingbird hawkmoth beats its wings about 85 times a second, or roughly one and a half wingbeats per 1/60-second exposure. The result is a streak with one or two bulges.
- A housefly beats its wings about 190 times a second, and a honeybee about 250. That works out to three or four wingbeats per exposure, giving a streak with three or four evenly spaced bulges: the classic segmented rod.
Distance does the rest. An insect a meter or two from the lens, crossing the frame in a fraction of a second, has no size reference in an open sky. A viewer naturally assumes it is far away, and therefore huge and impossibly fast. When the same camera is set to a fast shutter speed, the rods disappear and ordinary insects take their place. That is exactly what proponents’ theories cannot explain, and what the insect explanation predicts.[1][4]
A family of camera creatures
Rods have relatives. “Orbs,” the glowing translucent balls that appear in flash photographs of supposedly haunted places, are caused by the flash reflecting off dust, pollen, raindrops or moisture droplets close to the lens. They became common when compact digital cameras put the flash very near the lens. Long exposures at night turn car headlights, fireflies and handheld torches into streaks and loops that can look like moving spirits. Each new imaging technology, from long-exposure film to camcorders to digital cameras and smartphone night modes, has produced its own set of “phenomena” that were never seen with the eye.[8]
What sets rods apart is that they were tested directly. The Jilin experiment did not argue about what the footage showed. It simply caught the objects, and they turned out to be moths. That is a useful model for any claim based purely on images: if something appears on camera but never to the eye, look first at how the camera works.
It is easy to see why rods appealed in the 1990s. They seemed to offer something no other mystery could: a creature anyone could “capture” at home, with no expedition, just a camcorder, a sunny day and the patience to step through tape frame by frame. Every new clip seemed to add to the evidence. In reality, every new clip was another demonstration of the same optical effect.
Other analyses
- Robert Sheaffer, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2000 after attending one of Escamilla’s lectures, judged that some of the rods shown were clearly insects crossing the field of view at high speed, and that others looked like blurred bird wings.[3]
- The Straight Dope column (2000) also attributed rods to long exposure times and flying insects, drawing on Yanega’s explanation.[4]
- Skeptoid, Brian Dunning’s podcast, covered rods in one of its first episodes in 2006.[6]
You can reproduce the effect yourself: film flying insects against a bright sky with a camera set to a slow shutter speed, then step through the footage frame by frame.
Why rods are in the Index
Rods are not a creature, but they are a useful case study. They show how a new recording technology can create a new kind of “monster,” and how a simple, well-designed test can settle a question that arguing over footage never could. Several other reports in this index, especially those based only on photographs or video, deserve the same scrutiny.
For other claims of life in the skies, see our entry on Atmospheric Beasts.
References
- Robert Todd Carroll, “Rods,” in The Skeptic’s Dictionary (Hoboken: Wiley, 2003), with comments from entomologist Doug Yanega.
- “Rod (optical phenomenon),” Wikipedia.
- Robert Sheaffer, “ET, You’ve Got Mail,” Skeptical Inquirer 24, no. 2 (March–April 2000).
- Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope, column on “rods” (2000), as cited in Wikipedia, “Rod (optical phenomenon).”
- SINA Technology News, report on the CCTV investigation of “skyfish” in Tonghua, Jilin Province, 23 January 2006 (in Chinese).
- Brian Dunning, “Rods: Flying Absurdities,” Skeptoid episode 3 (19 October 2006).
- “Insect flight,” Wikipedia, for wingbeat frequencies of the large white butterfly, hummingbird hawkmoth, housefly and honeybee.
- “Orb (optics),” Wikipedia, on backscatter from airborne particles in flash photography.
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from published analyses. An earlier version described rods with luminous colored bodies and fin-like appendages used for propulsion, and linked them to folklore about “sky spirits,” without sources. Those claims have been removed. The images on this page are artistic impressions; rods themselves exist only in recordings.