Bokeh Orb

A bokeh orb is the soft, geometrically shaped blur that an out-of-focus point of light takes on when photographed with a camera — the shape determined not by anything in the scene itself but by the physical aperture blades inside the specific lens used, producing circles, hexagons, or other polygon shapes depending on lens design, with the effect strongest whenever a bright light source sits closer to the lens than the plane the camera is actually focused on. The phenomenon is the direct source of most viral "morphing orb" UFO footage shot on smartphones, since phone camera lenses use small, simple apertures that produce especially pronounced and visually strange bokeh shapes, and because a handheld phone recording in low light frequently has trouble holding sharp focus on a distant point of light in the first place, letting the orb shape shift and pulse on screen as focus and camera shake vary from frame to frame. The confusion connects directly to the two competing meanings of "orb" in UFO terminology: a bokeh orb is purely a camera-lens artifact with no independent existence outside the photograph or video itself, entirely distinct from a genuinely reported solid metallic-sphere UAP, and investigators reviewing submitted phone footage check first whether the "orb" changes shape as the camera moves, the classic bokeh tell.