Orb

"Orb" has two entirely different meanings that UFO researchers work hard to keep separate, since conflating them wastes serious investigative effort on artifacts. In the genuine UAP-reporting sense, an orb is a self-luminous or metallic spherical object, now the single most commonly reported shape in modern military UAP data, including the object recorded in Colombia's widely discussed 2025 Buga sphere case. In the completely unrelated photographic sense, an "orb" is the small, translucent, out-of-focus circle that appears in flash photography when airborne dust, pollen, moisture droplets, or insects pass close to the camera lens outside the plane of focus — a well-understood optical artifact of the camera itself, not of anything actually present in the photographed scene. The two meanings collided hard in early-2000s "ghost hunting" and paranormal photography culture, where dust-mote flash orbs were widely, and wrongly, presented as spirit or anomaly evidence, a confusion serious UAP researchers now go out of their way to correct whenever a witness submits flash photographs. A genuine reported metallic-sphere UAP is a solid, structured object typically seen in daylight or on sensor data without a camera flash anywhere near it — the two "orb" categories share a word but nothing else.