It’s a bird…it’s a plane….

It is actually neither.  When you are using a laser scanner a short laser pulse is emitted away from the scanner and is reflected back by objects it hits.  A part of the reflected radiation comes back to the scanner where it is detected by a sensor.  Because the light-speed is known the time elapsed between emission and reception of the pulse can be measured and divided in half for the distance of the object.   The sun emits radiation on the same wavelength as the scanner, so when the receiving lens is pointing at the sun, it reads the sun’s radiation as well as the scanner’s reflected pulse. The second part of the measurement when discussing a Time of Flight scanner is time.  Since the scanner is timing the reflection relative to the emitted pulse, and the sun’s radiation “adds to” to the laser pulse and alters the timing and the result is an artificially high reading that seems to drift off into space.