
© Patterson-Gimlin/public domainFamous VFC-2 Frame 354 (popularly referred to as 352)
The anthropological sciences occasionally have to deal with something which has a profound but unexpected impact on our understanding of human origins.
Two events are noteworthy, in part because both impacted powerfully upon our concept of human evolution, but also because they were diametric opposites. One was a truth first rejected, and the other was a false contrivance embraced as fact. As presented in Roger Levin's fine text,
Bones of Contention, the stories of the Piltdown Man and the Taung Child were meaningful because they demonstrated that ultimately the evidence will lead to the truth, but first, one must examine that evidence with an impartial and open mind.
Sadly, they also illustrated that confirmation bias is a serious and formidable obstacle in the search for truth. Piltdown was a fraud, an orangutan jaw mated to a human skull, and it confirmed the bias of expecting that our human ancestor would be an ape-like body affixed to a human cranium, thus affirming that regardless of how primitive the body, the illustrious human mind remained robustly beyond any mere ape.
Taung was a truthful hominid fossil, but its rightful place in human origins was rejected for many years because of its small brain. So, when we consider that some evidence with potential impact upon human origins is misunderstood, or suffers in the face of a confirmation bias, the idea has a solid foundation of prior examples demonstrating that exact issue.
Comment: Update 20 Dec 2017
These could have been aircraft of some kind, but they were either - depending on eyewitness reports - completely or unusually silent. Given that there's no official involvement, the plane angle means they must be part of some sort of 'top secret' operations. But then why give away their presence with bright flashy lights and a striking visual formation?
Here's another interesting video captured by a Denver resident who claims the string of lights was preceded by an 'asteroid' (by which he probably means a meteor fireball):
Here's how the video uploader described what he saw (and no, to him also, they weren't planes): One possible match for this fireball report is logged on the American Meteor Society as having occurred at 03:32 UTC on December 10th, which corresponds to 20:32 local time on December 9th. Here's video footage of that fireball as seen from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
Weird!