01 Q: You’ve called the stories of astronaut UFO encounters “one of the greatest myths of the Space Age” and “probably the most fascinating and frustrating theme of modern folklore”. What do you find so unbelievable, or so unreliable, about all of these stories, photographs, videos, sound bites, documentaries, and other evidence?

A: From hundreds and hundreds of such stories and videos that I’ve studied, they all look to me to be ‘ordinary’ visual effects of human space missions, understandable public misunderstandings of normal space conversations, and predictable exaggerations, confabulations, and even fabrications of people who enjoy – or profit from – telling wild tales. I’ve seen no compelling indication of anything beyond the realm of modern science – nothing.

02 Q: Why is your view so at variance with other people’s, in defiance of what appears to be overwhelming evidence?

A: As a professional spaceflight ‘problem solver’ and a private space history researcher I’ve learned enough about real spaceflight and real folklore to understand how these stories could get started, how they could expand and mutate and proliferate. I’ve had enough experience with real spaceflight to realize that what’s being seen in many videos is nothing beyond the ‘norm’ from fully mundane phenomena occurring in unearthly settings. And unlike practically everyone else who believes the stories, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with primary witnesses and major cultural players, and I’ve had access to original technical records and performance data.

03 Q: For millions of people around the world, the ‘astronaut UFO cases’ are the ‘jewel in the crown’ of ‘Ufology’, which is the study of UFO reports and the argument that such reports constitute evidence for extraordinary events that might even include visitations by non-human space travelers. If they are all wrong, why should you care?

A: If they’re all wrong, as I think they are, the social implications are significant beyond this limited subject matter. We should be asking how it could happen in this case that popular culture is so far off base -- how it might be happening in other areas of public beliefs.

04 Q: What is most frustrating to you about these stories?

A: These widespread beliefs are frustrating because it appears to be only tenuously connected with the real world – with authentic evidence, with eyewitness testimony, with thorough investigations of potential prosaic explanations. Counter-arguments and possible prosaic explanations are either ignored or misrepresented in a blatantly propagandistic fashion.

05 Q: What’s the harm in these stories?

A: The first victims of these stories are the believers themselves, especially the young people who are genuinely interested in space exploration, science, and humanity’s place in the Universe. Their assessments of these and related topics can stay seriously warped for a long time, sometimes a lifetime. And often when they come to realize they were misled, they feel a bitterness to the entire concept of spaceflight.

06 Q: You’ve also claimed the stories are “dangerously distracting, and unintentionally insulting both the subject matter and the target audience” .That’s a pretty broad put-down of a broad topic, how do you justify it?

A: It’s dangerous both to our astronauts and the entire nation because incorrect interpretations of in-flight reports can distract from glimpses of genuine hazards on space missions. With too many false alarms, perhaps a genuine warning could be overlooked, even briefly.

07 Q: What harm does it do to NASA?

A: NASA can look after its own reputation, but there’s an even greater danger. The dominance of counterfeit claims can discredit the skeptical scrutiny that NASA deserves both as a large tax-funded bureaucracy and as a culture historically infected with its own often-arrogant delusions and bad judgments that need exposure and outsider criticism. If a lot of criticism is based on these kinds of myths, well-deserved criticism can also be discredited [“guilty by association”] and unfairly disregarded.

08 Q: What is ‘insulting’ about these stories?

A: They are insulting because belief that these stories are authentic requires the belief that generations of space workers, including astronauts, are liars, cowards, and/or fools. It’s even insulting to its believers, since the common manifestations of these stories on youtube, pulp magazines, TV documentaries, and elsewhere generally seem to assume that the target audience consists of credulous eager-believers who know nothing about real space flight and prefer ego-boosting make-believe to difficult research and explication.

09 Q: How could these stories be dangerous to the future of science, or even the future of civilization.

A: Here’s one possible drawback of overeager acceptance, or its opposite, knee-jerk disbelief. The overwhelmingly bogus nature of the myth can make it harder to recognize those situations in which space missions do come across phenomena of genuine interest. But because of this powerful myth, these “real”sightings could be lumped into the mix of misinterpretations, and not have the proper attention paid to them. They would not be recognized, and we’d all be the poorer for it.

10 Q: What about the multiple claims attributed to astronauts and cosmonauts over the decades about encountering alien phenomena in space?

A: Many of the widely published claims are total fantasy, conjured up by other people and attributed falsely to real people. Most of the stories, especially videos and photographs, show phenomena that we have learned are ‘normal’ to spaceflight and the hardware that humans use there, with no extraordinary causes required. These visual phenomena represent what we’ve come to recognize as expected perceptions of the consequences of human space activity. A very few others are indeed straightforward accounts of visual effects that are genuinely interesting – but hardly suggestive of ETI or unknown physics or biology.

11 Q: How can they ALL be nonsense?

A: They’re not, although most really are. A very few – but important few – seem to describe intriguing atmospheric visual phenomena well worth following up on, or space and missile activities of a military nature. And another family of reports is of critical importance, since they may represent clues to the malfunctioning of the spacecraft on which the witnesses are riding, and it’s important to quickly recognize and react to such sightings. Lastly, some could represent phenomena of genuine scientific interest, but in that case they need to be weeded out from the blizzard of nonsense they currently are lost in.

12 Q: Why are YOUR opinions particularly worth listening to?

A: I stand in a fairly unique position, one leg in the world of real spaceflight operations, the other in the culture of popular mythology. In the first, I’ve come to know what is to be expected, visually and otherwise, in space, and I’ve worked with many, many astronauts [and more than a few cosmonauts] on both professional and personal levels. In the second, I’ve come to appreciate the cultural dynamic of exciting stories and how both human perception/memory, and human memory and narrative, influence the development of such stories.

13 Q: Should people be ashamed of having fallen for these misinterpretations and misrepresentations?

A: Well, at the least, they should learn to be a lot more cautious in accepting extraordinary claims, and be less trusting of advocacy TV programs that promise ‘inside information’ and ‘top secret’ revelations. But figuring out the real causes of many of these stories and videos requires obtaining contextual information that is not always easily at hand. When it is available, or when NASA does offer well-documented explanations, they are almost impossible to locate on the Internet using traditional search engines. So the lesson might be for people to make deliberate searches for contrary explanations that already exist but are ignored by the proponents.

14Q: Does NASA take the public fascination with these myths seriously?

A: In my experience, NASA press officials, when asked clearly and soberly, try to offer helpful information and explanations. But these efforts are so often disregarded or themselves misrepresented that I’m sad to have to say that I detect from NASA public information staffers some level of helpless exasperation and even cynical contempt for the publicists and writers who promote the myth. I think NASA should have a centralized page on its website that summarizes their responses, for easy public access, but they don’t seem to think it’s worth the effort – and they may be right..

15 Q: Does NASA view these reports seriously?

A: For safety reasons, at the very least, NASA flight controllers do indeed pay attention, and have been doing so for decades. John Glenn’s report of ‘fireflies’ was closely examined as an indicator of how the cooling system – an externally-mounted ‘flash evaporator’ that used water to cool the capsule – may have been malfunctioning. On Apollo-13, observations of ice particles out the window helped quickly characterize the severity of the cryogenic tank explosion. During Apollo missions, reports and images of what came to be humorously called ‘moon pigeons’ provided clues to the status of critical external components such as heat shields and thermal blankets. A Skylab mission was nearly aborted with a rescue flight when ‘snow’ showed that a thruster was leaking precious fuel. A critical international space rendezvous in 1995 was nearly cancelled because of excessive fuel leaks, observed as ice swarms outside the STS-63 window. Structural pieces of shuttle missions have been observed and closely examined by camera zoom, but the most serious shuttle space failure, the ‘Columbia’ disaster, missed a chance to be forewarned when a hunk of the vital heat shield drifted away but was NOT observed by eyeball or camera. For reasons such as these, strange-looking outside stuff gets the immediate attention of Mission Control – and all in public.

See my 1994 briefing: “Mitigation of Hazards of Shuttle-Generated Debris”,
http://www.jamesoberg.com/9307xx-sc-generated-debris.PDF

and this Apollo-era NASA study of anomalous external objects
http://www.jamesoberg.com/moonpigeons.html

Here’s how a timely report of a ‘UFO’ might have saved the lives of the Columbia crew during their doomed January 2003 mission: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3077571/

…and here’s why reports of ‘stuff’ were always made rapidly and openly:
MSNBC // June 13, 2008 // Why NASA watches out for true UFOs
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/25147760/

16 Q: Does NASA swear its astronauts to secrecy about UFOs?

A: This is an easy excuse to make about why they consistently say they do NOT see UFOs on missions. But it’s a made-up myth, as far as I can tell and as far as astronauts (including UFO believers such as Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper) have repeatedly explained. Aside from details of a handful of Pentagon payloads on a few shuttles, crewmembers are not constrained about discussing what the see on space missions, nor are guests from a dozen or more other nations who have also flown on shuttle missions.

17 Q: Do NASA astronauts possessing forbidden secrets about space UFO encounters disclose these “off the record” to strangers in hallways at conferences?

A: When worded this way, it’s ridiculous – of course not. But so much of the ‘space UFO mythos’ is full of ‘admissions’ made to some unnamed ‘professor’ by a top astronaut in a dark hallway.

18 Q Has anyone in the space program ever really been punished for blabbing ‘UFO secrets’?

A: This is a convenient ‘self-verifying’ excuse for how astronaut testimony and flight records not only do NOT support such stories, they head-on refute them. This is explained in the mythos by the threat of enforcement by dire punishment. But while I was working for OMNI magazine in the early 1990s we instigated a major research campaign to locate any person, anywhere in the space or military environment, who ever seems to have suffered any retribution for public statements. We could not find a single verifiable case.

19 Q: Does NASA have ‘secret radio channels’ for discussing forbidden subjects?

A: Mission Control can indeed talk with astronauts on privatized channels, routinely for medical and family discussions, but presumably equally as well for any other topic, if they choose to keep it off the public airwaves. But since most of the astronaut-UFO myths involve quotations allegedly picked up on the public-broadcast channels, it seems the subject of seeing strange stuff is NOT one that needs ‘cover-up’.

20 Q: Does NASA have a ‘squelch’ button to stop voice transmissions?

A: Yes. The public affairs officer has a console in Mission Control that does include a button to halt audio relay to the public [I took a photo of the button on a recent media tour] but the intent is for temporary emergency use. I’ve never found any evidence it was ever used to block public knowledge of interesting space events.

21 Q:  Does NASA impose a time delay on retransmission of space audio/video

A: From my colleagues in Mission Control, I have been persuasively advised that all transmission delays are the result of signal processing, format conversions, and line lag [speed of light issues with communications satellites]. I can see delays of several seconds on internet streaming, as well. I’ve found no indication that any additional signal hold-ups have been deliberately implemented.

22 Q: Didn’t NASA change its policy of management of air-to-ground after the STS-48 ‘zig-zag’ case [1991]?

A: This is an old story, that seems to be explained this way. Because of recently improved space-to-ground capabilities based on the newly deployed Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System [which fed all communications down to the White Sands site], NASA was releasing all raw downlink television round the clock over open feeds from a commercial communications satellite. Concerns over medical privacy based on impending Spacelab science missions led to a decision to route the raw feed to one NASA center in encrypted form and decrypt it there for release through the commercial network. This added a processing delay. But the vast portion of TV was still released essentially ‘unfiltered’, as the thousands of youtube videos attest.

23 Q: Do [or did] the operators in Mission Control ever deliberately cut way from space scenes that show unexplained objects?

A: No. I’ve known colleagues at the shuttle’s INCO console [Instrumentation and Communication] who have direct control of external camera pan/tilt commands and video downlinks, and they tell me that such an action would be directly contrary to safety requirements when something that’s initially unrecognizable is seen. Because it could be – and sometimes has been – an indicator of vehicle malfunction or damage, everybody needs to see it as soon as possible, to assess it, to prepare and implement a response. 

24 Q: Isn’t there a duplicate Mission Control Center operating behind a wall of secrecy?

A: NASA had two duplicate control rooms in the building 30 complex, on the 2nd and 3rd floors. For a period of time, one was ‘secured’ for classified DoD missions [at the SECRET level only], but when they ended in the early 1990’s it was opened up for routine use. An annex to the building was later constructed with two more control centers for space station support, although primary station support was later moved back to one of the shuttle rooms. But the facilities are all in one building and they are open to public viewing during tours.

24 Q How can people monitor audio and video from space?

A: Live video is available from the International Space Station, including internal views when the crew is on-duty and Earth views at other times. The video is accompanied by audio of conversations between the crew and Mission Control. This video is only available when the space station is in contact with the ground. During "loss of signal" periods, viewers may see a test pattern or a graphical world map that depicts the station’s location in orbit above the Earth. Since the station orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes, it experiences a sunrise or a sunset about every 45 minutes. When the station is in darkness, external camera video may appear black, but can sometimes provide spectacular views of lightning or city lights below

ISS live stream
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/iss_ustream.html
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream
https://market.android.com/details?id=gov.nasa.isslive

25 Q: How can ordinary people obtain videos from past missions?

A: TBS details

26Q: Why do people so badly misinterpret video scenes from space missions?

A: In discussions with people who are convinced what they are seeing can only be explained as alien vehicles or ‘plasma critters’ or other extraordinary stimuli, it’s become clear to me that they are being misled by their eye-brain interpretation algorithms that have evolved and been fine-tuned under normal earthside conditions. They make ‘reasonable’ assumptions about what outer space should look like, often based on Hollywood special effects. So the genuinely unearthly visual environment, as seen on REAL imagery from space, isn’t what they expect, and they apply time-tested processing fine for ordinary life to extraordinary images.
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27Q TBD

28 Q: Who are the witnesses to these reported ‘space UFOs’?

A: Most of these widely-circulated stories HAVE no witnesses – they are just associated with youtube videos of dots moving across the camera’s field of view. No shuttle astronaut has ever claimed to have seen a UFO in space, and those that have bothered to comment on the published claims have debunked them as misunderstandings and misrepresentations by the media. Stories from the Gemini-Apollo-Skylab era involve things that look like other manmade objects, with no behavioral characteristics that are sufficiently unusual to arouse any serious suspicions.

29 Q: Are you calling the astronauts liars?

A: Just the opposite – I’m advocating listening to what the real astronauts really say about their experiences, which is usually NOT the way it is reported on websites and cable TV. It’s the UFO proponents who are accusing the astronauts of lying when they do NOT agree that they’ve seen UFOs in space,.

30 Q: Are you calling non-astronauts with personal stories of space UFO evidence, liars?

A: I’ve never seen persuasive evidence that any of the several dozen stories from former space workers are deliberate fabrications. They look more like misunderstandings of normal events, or multiply-retold embellishments of long-ago tales, that drift from original memories over the decades. Some stories look like adopted tales heard from a third party, and a few others have the unreal aura of dreams. The key to determining their veracity is comparing their claims to other sources and to actual spaceflight operational features. And none measure up – none are corroborated.

31 Q: Are you calling those who report and repeat such stories liars?

A: I don’t think most such folks know or care if the stories are true or not, but if they are claiming that they’ve investigated the stories and found NO plausible prosaic explanation, then they are departing from the truth. Or else they are providing evidence that their claim to be competent, unbiased investigators is itself dubious.

32 Q: Have you found any cases of deliberate fraud or falsification?

A: A number of photographic alterations and misrepresentations have been made, some involving image manipulation. Fuzzballs photographed on Apollo-11 were window reflections, ‘twin UFOs’ on Gemini-7 were nose thrusters, and a circular craft in an Apollo-12 photo is the sunlit front end of the S-4B booster stage with the rest of the rocket airbrushed out. Some shuttle video of nearby free-flying payloads [such as the AERcam or the Wake Shield] often appear on youtube as ‘UFOs’. And many quotations attributed to astronauts appear to be fictitious – according to the astronauts themselves. But by far the most common type of evidence is simply misunderstood imagery made to seem exciting due to mistaken assumptions.

33 Q: Why are there so MANY television documentaries, magazines, and websites that promote the stories?

A:  Clearly there is an avid viewership for such stories, but there may be more cynical business decisions at play. Most of these venues make their money by selling commercial messages. What better pitch theme can there be for potential advertisers than that you will create a program that will be predominantly watched by people who will easily believe anything?

34 Q: What have these ‘space UFOs’ turned out to be?

A: Some of them turn out to be the same things ‘ground UFOs’ have been, such as misperceived normal human flight activity, natural atmospheric phenomena [when looking downward towards Earth], window reflections, defects, or contamination, or on occasion, bright celestial objects such as the Moon and – yes! – Venus. On occasion, during night passes, astronauts on space walks in the dark have seen what turned out to be bright lights on Earth’s surface passing beneath them. Some are other orbiting space vehicles, but only rarely. Most are ‘stuff’ coming off the vehicle the observation is being made from, that flies along with the vehicle for a period of time. See the locations of these vents here: http://www.jamesoberg.com/orbiter-vents.PDF

35  Q: How much of it is “space junk”?

A: Very, very little, actually – if you use the standard definition of “space junk” to mean other satellites and pieces off of them, which constitute an impact hazard to human space missions and automated satellites as well. Because all orbiting objects are moving at tremendous speeds in different directions, when they do pass closely to each other, they zip past at several miles per second. Thus they are extremely difficult to detect visually. Anything that was seen over a period of time longer than a few seconds would have to have been something closely following the observer, and thus associated with the vehicle from which the observation was being made. Now, that's unless it was somebody else’s vehicle deliberately keeping pace, of course. But "space junk" as we commonly use the term? Hardly ever, maybe never.

36 Q: How often do astronauts see passing satellites out the window, or on TV screens.

A: Astronauts have observed other distant satellites, but not often. On special research programs, some astronauts have been able to spot ‘Iridium flares’ [Don Pettit, for example]. But on occasion when the crew was advised to look for a particularly close [a few miles] pass of a large satellites, every effort to detect the fly-by visually has failed. I have never found a single case of an observed nearby object turning out to be a passing satellite in independent orbit.

37 Q: But aren’t they flying through clouds of ‘space junk’? How could all those tens of thousands of objects be invisible?

A: I’ve got to admit that this has been really surprising to me since like so many others I had at first overlooked how big space is and how FAST criss-crossing orbits diverge. The earthside analogy of airplanes on different headings being visible to each other in midair as they crossed paths just overwhelmed a rational consideration of the way space is so very different, so unearthly. It makes sense now that eyeballs would almost never notice such fast passersby, so I can understand how the public has fallen for the same false analogy.

38 Q: Don’t astronauts keep a visual or radar watch out for approaching satellites in order to dodge a possible collision?

A: Surprisingly, no. At the relative speeds of objects in space, objects would only be detectable [if at all] within a few seconds of impact. Collision predictions are made hours or days in advance because much more powerful ground radars observe and catalog everything in orbit, and powerful computers predict their future flight paths to see if they may soon get close enough to threaten collision. The shuttle’s Ku-band dish antenna was mainly used for communications via relay satellites, but it could operate in a ‘skin-track’ mode for taking navigation ‘marks’ on a target satellite for a rendezvous or separation – but only at a range inside about 10 miles. And when using the antenna for tracking, it could not be used for data or video relay. There is no radar tracking capability on the ISS.

39: Q: But haven’t space station crewmembers observed the launch of vehicles headed their way, and the return to Earth of departing crew vehicles?

A: They have, and obtained spectacular imagery. But those vehicles, coming and going, were on parallel paths with the space station, with similar velocities. So they stayed in sight for several minutes or more. In fact, that‘s why anything out the window that stays in sight for minutes or more has to be associated with the station [or shuttle] and not be some ‘space stranger’.

40 Q: If not from existing swarms of ‘space junk’, where does this stuff come from?

A: I think the overwhelming majority of real ‘stuff’ seen by astronauts or via television or film [motion and still] is derived directly from the vehicle they happen to be aboard. I call it ‘dandruff’ to differentiate it from ‘space junk’ – which I do NOT think accounts for any of these notorious sightings..

41 Q: What sorts of visible things are shed by a space vehicle?

A: The vehicle may have dropped a booster stage or structural support elements, such as the objects seen by moon-bound Apollo crews, or the Skylab crews (the station’s S-II booster). Insulation fragments had a tendency to ‘shed’ on Gemini and Apollo and Skylab {which regularly released small reddish fragments seen through the on-board solar telescope, out the wardroom window, and on space walks), and spacewalkers on occasion manually jettisoned excess equipment during hatch openings. During payload deploys, retaining straps and pyrobolt shells could be seen and imaged. On shuttles, right after reaching orbit a lot of ice associated with the cryogenic main engines [including a particularly weird-shaped ice sculpture that often formed at the interface of the shuttle and its external fuel tank feed line] came off and was clearly seen. Later on shuttle flights, small hardware items would float out of the payload bay, or become detached from mechanical structures outside. Tile fragments and strips of polyurethane ‘gap filler’ material were also noticed on a number of flights. Several deployed payloads, including inflatable structures and spherical free-flying camera pods, have been inaccurately described on ‘youtube’ as ‘unknowns’. During spacewalks, packing materials might be jettisoned, or tools come loose accidentally [and once, several golf balls swatted off into space]. But by far the largest population of sources of videotaped ‘dots’ has been effluent from inside the vehicles, such as water and propellant [hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide] ice, from more than a hundred external valves – some deliberate, such as water dumps and flash evaporator operation and hydraulic pressure pump testing, but most accidental from seeping thruster valves.

41 Q: Was the space shuttle, or the Soyuz, really so rickety that pieces were always falling off? That sounds dangerous.

A: Most of the dandruff seems to consist of non-critical materials, predominantly ice flecks formed from water dumps and propellant leaks through engine valves. But once and awhile something that really might be critical – a thermal tile, or a hinge clip, or some such – does drift by. That’s exactly why NASA observes such ‘bogies’ so carefully.

42: Q: How could this degree of dandruff be tolerated, purely from a collision safety point of view?

A: Anything solid, coming off a space vehicle, has a very low relative speed, so it wouldn’t be a threat to puncture the hull. If it comes around in orbit and does make slow recontact, it would probably bounce off harmlessly.

43 Q: What directions could such stuff be seen to fly in?

A: Because of the large size of the space shuttle and its widely distributed sources of effluent or other shedding, and the location of external cameras and windows, ‘dandruff’ can drift across a camera’s field of view in practically any and all directions. But it doesn’t change the big picture that stuff visible to a shuttle camera is orbiting very close to – and hence probably originated from – the shuttle [or station] itself.

44 Q: Aren’t there reports of seeing objects in ‘polar orbit’, very different from the paths of human spacecraft?

A: Sometimes when a ‘bogie’ crosses the field of view, this has initially been interpreted as meaning it is in a north-south ‘polar orbit’ and hence cannot have originated from the viewer’s vehicle. But these interpretations relied on terrestrial flying experience of aircraft whose paths crossed in the sky. They could see each other for several minutes and make good estimates of the true headings of the other vehicles. It wasn’t appreciated how FAST objects orbiting Earth are going, and how quickly they would zip past each other if they actually WERE in criss-crossing orbits. For anything near a polar orbit, viewed from a crew-carrying spacecraft in a much lower orbital inclination, its motion would take it from one side of the sky to the other in a second or two at most. This is not what witnesses actually report or motion imaging captures, so the much slower left-to-right moving objects cannot be in true ‘polar orbits’.
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45 Q: Sometimes nearby dots seem to be headed down to Earth. Were they deliberately sent in that direction?

A: You’ve got to remember that compared to the 25,000 foot per second speed of the shuttle, anything drifting by at a few feet per second at most are still on closely parallel paths. Something seen moving ‘up’ or ‘down’ in the camera field-of-view is still only drifting randomly nearby. Even videos of departing spacecraft such as shuttles or Soyuzes show them apparently pacing the station, not swooping quickly back towards Earth..

46 Q: Did the shuttle cameras make this kind of stuff look even more mysterious?

A: Yes. The cameras weren’t scientific instruments, they were rugged off-the-shelf units intended to allow observation of what was going on in the payloads bay. But they were also used for sightseeing of the Earth and sky. If small objects have a large enough angular rate, camera optics latency will create a streaking effect. Also, an ‘overbright protect’ feature would dull-down pixels that had maxed out their receptors, leading to bright objects having dark centers. Small dots could look like do-nuts, bright cities would have blacked-out downtowns, lightning-lit clouds would seem hollow. Sometimes even regular stars took on small irregular outlines – as images of ‘Orion’ and other recognizable constellations showed.

47Q:  Could the shuttle cameras see into light spectra invisible to the human eye?

A: The shuttle cameras operated mainly in the visible light spectrum, and handheld cameras inside the shuttle looked out through windows specifically designed to filter out harmful infrared and ultraviolet light. Once and awhile there were special-purpose scientific instruments for ultraviolet [or infra-red] observations, but their data was sent directly to scientists and was rarely broadcast live [although it could happen]. For shuttle camera details, see http://www.jamesoberg.com/INCO-CHB-CCTV1.PDF and
http://www.jamesoberg.com/INCO-CHB-CCTV2.PDF

48 Q: Did the crew ever see meteors?

A: There have been some reports, along with excellent video of controlled atmospheric entry by other space vehicles departing from the station. But most of what NASA press officers describe as ‘meteors’ on live shuttle downlink TV are more likely nearby sunlit dandruff particles that they simply are guessing about. The latency effect in the camera optics creates a ‘trail’ for a fast-moving point source [this is seen even with stars when the camera is rapidly panning].

49Q  Did ‘space dandruff’ occur randomly, or mainly during certain flight phases?

Since these objects were being knocked off of, or expelled from, space vehicles, they are far more common during dynamic operations when thrusters are firing or payloads are being deployed. Spacecraft can also perform ‘water dumps’, although the ISS rarely does – it keeps the water for crew use. A shuttle cooling unit called the ‘flash evaporator’ also occasionally was active, spewing snowflakes – most notably on the day before landing when the crew tested all the equipment prior to betting their lives on it. This is why it’s so important when viewing space videos to know exactly when the scene occurred, so it can be correlated with spacecraft activity known to create dandruff. This critical information is rarely made available by youtube posters.

50 Q  How can ‘space dandruff’ flash on and off?

A: As objects slowly tumble in space, they often – not always – turn different-sized faces towards the cameras. If they happen to be rotating around an axis mostly perpendicular to the line of sight, they can get brighter and dimmer in a regular pattern. Ice flakes often form in thin sheets before breaking loose and they can flash brilliantly. But even spinning particles can produce steady reflections if they are fairly symmetrical.

51 Q: How can inert objects keep pace with a spacecraft moving 18,000 miles per hour?

A: Even after fifty years of spaceflight this concept still baffles lots of intelligent people. It’s the speed at which the satellite is falling sideways that keeps it in space, not its engines or any other propulsion technology. Any object placed near a satellite will pace it through space. This also explains why the shuttle can orbit the Earth in any orientation – not just nose forward.

52 Q: What are typical motions of nearby objects?

A: Three major features dictate the expected motion of small, light objects near a spacecraft such as the shuttle or the space station. They are “orbital mechanics” effects [sometimes called ‘astrodynamics’], differential air drag [at the altitudes typical of shuttle and station flights], and vehicle plume/outgassing events. As a result, objects can drift backwards, reverse course, zip below the vehicle and vanish ahead within minutes or an hour or two. They can abruptly change angular rate and course. They can behave in genuinely bizarre-looking motion that is truly ‘unearthly’ – which is only to be expected because they are NOT on Earth [or in Kansas].

53 Q: Explain “differential air drag”

A: Moving at 25,000 feet per second, orbiting objects do hit some air molecules that reach up that high, and this slows the orbiting object. But objects that are less dense – more frontal area but less mass – are slowed down more significantly that ‘thicker’ objects – high mass concentrated into smaller volume – are slowed. As a result, ‘lighter’ stuff such as insulation or ice flakes slow down more quickly, drop into lower orbits, and then pull ahead [because of speed gained in the descent] of the objects that are denser, such as the main spacecraft. In extreme cases this effect can be detected over periods of 10 to 20 minutes.

54 Q: Explain “orbital mechanics”

A: Objects at different altitudes need different velocities to remain in circular orbits, and lower objects thus pull ahead of higher ones. A ‘rule of thumb’ in Mission Control said that something 100 feet lower would pull ahead by ten times 100 feet every full circuit of Earth [every ‘orbit’, or ‘revolution’]. That “10:1” rule applies to a wide range of altitude differences.

55 Q: Do objects moving away from a spacecraft continue until lost to sight?

A: No, they often come BACK in an hour or two. This is an even more bizarre behavior, when nearby objects are slowly moving in relatively different directions – although both are flying NEARLY parallel at 25,000 ft/sec. Something moving off to either SIDE of a central object will depart for 15 to 20 minutes, then come to a stop and begin moving BACK towards its point of origin, arriving there with the original departure speed, in about half an orbit, or 45 minutes. Something pushed away UPWARDS will rise, then slowly fall behind and pass downwards behind the spacecraft, but then swoop lower and catch up with the spacecraft and return to it a full orbit later. Something pushed FORWARD will pull ahead and gradually climb in height, slowing down and passing overhead headed backwards, and vanish aft from sight – but if influenced by differential drag, it can then slip back into a lower, faster orbit and overtake the spacecraft from behind in the hours ahead. Only something pushed BACKWARDS will safely depart the neighborhood of the spacecraft, as it falls behind, slips into a lower orbit, and then can be seen passing below the spacecraft moving out ahead of it – but safely below it.

56 Q: Explain “vehicle pluming”

A: Attitude control thrusters fire under manual or autopilot command, and create a 10,000 ft/sec effluent plume that can pack plenty of punch. Unlike such plumes in an atmosphere, plumes in a vacuum spread to an amazing degree. Half of a shuttle’s thruster plume flow spread out at angles greater than 30 degrees off centerline, and some is still present at 90 degrees off centerline and even higher.

57Q: Do plumes move in one direction like a jet engine exhaust on Earth?

A: No. The plume particles bounce off vehicle structure that they hit. This is not 'reflective' [angle out = angle in] but random. This effect is most noticeable for the shuttle’s aft down-firing jets, which seriously impinge on structure such as elevons and the ‘body flap’ [losing about 30 % of their effective thrust in this impingement]. A down-firing jet ‘splashes back’ a significant portion of its exhaust into the space above the reflecting surface.

58 Q: Will something floating nearby always get hit by thruster plumes when they fire?

A: No. Another important affect that must be appreciated is ‘plume shadowing’, where objects closest to a camera may be over or inside the shuttle’s payload bay. Since it is impossible to judge range from merely observing a dot on a screen, it can be puzzling to observe that some of the dots may be affected by a plume and others not. But this can be because some are far enough away from the camera to be out of the structural plume shadow, and others are not.

59 Q: What do such plumes look like, on TV or to the eye?

A: It’s important to realize that plumes are not continuously visible even when an engine is firing. This is most evident in watching plumes from the shuttle’s three main engines and its larger ‘Orbital Maneuvering System’ [OMS] engines, which ‘flash’ when starting up and stopping but largely burn invisibly. Smaller ‘Reaction Control System’ [RCS] thrusters [both ‘Primary’ and the smaller ‘Vernier’ thrusters] can display bright centerline plumes but the visibility of the plume drops off rapidly with greater angle off centerline, even though plume flow is present. The visibility is usually due to propellant mixture deviations that occur when both valves open or close nearly but not precisely simultaneously, or otherwise during a burn when there is a slight ‘burp’ in one of the flow lines. For long [5-10 second] RCS burns, they also can be mostly invisible during the stable portion of the burn.

60 Q: Explain “vehicle outgassing”

A: Cabin air can be vented through specific valves, to adjust interior pressure or dump waste gas such as carbon dioxide or methane. Water [or waste water] can also be released, and depending on flow rate can generate an invisible gentle plume all the way to a blizzard of flash-frozen ice crystals. On shuttles, hydraulic power units expel vapor when ‘burning’ hydrazine to provide the push needed to move aerosurfaces.

61Q: What is the ‘Constellation Urion” effect?

A: In the Gemini and Apollo program, urine was dumped overboard through a special tube. It would flash into ice and glitter in the sun, One photograph of such a cloud was dubbed the ‘constellation Urion’. Sorry to disappoint the gross-minded, but fecal material is NOT jettisoned.

62Q: What were John Glenn’s ‘fireflies’ and do they still accompany spaceships?

A: For manned spaceships on short flights, waste heat from electrical power consumption and crew metabolism has to be released into space. The easiest way is to cool a heat exchanger surface by spraying it with water, which evaporates and sucks heat out of the plate. This was the mechanism on Mercury capsules that discharged so much ice fragments; it was called a ‘water spray boiler’ On shuttles, a ‘flash evaporator’ near the forward base of the tail sometimes expels water to dump heat from electrical usage, although the shuttle also had large thermal radiator panels – as does the ISS.

63 Q: Do spacesuits “outgas” differently than the main space vehicles?

A: Yes indeed. There are special phenomena during spacewalks. Spacesuits can release gas, and they also release water vapor from cooling devices. Although it’s invisible, this flow is powerful and when sometimes aimed in the ‘wrong’ direction can gradually shift the entire space vehicle off its desired orientation. Also, residual air in an airlock will rush out the hatch as soon as it is opened, often entraining floating debris from inside the airlock. And although rarely used, EVA mobility units can fire pulses of nitrogen or other materials to provide propulsion to free-flying astronauts.

64 Q: What’s such a big deal about ‘outgassing’?

A: The most serious angle to outgassing is when it is accidental, usually involving either the failure of a valve or of a pressurized line – or even, conceivably, a hole in a window seal or cabin pressure hull or [on the shuttle] a tire. Or in a spacesujt. You want to know about this immediately – or sooner. So any particle moving, seen by eyeball or TV, is a potential signal of trouble. You can also see this effect when coolant loop connectors are being handled during spacewalk repairs outside the station, as blizzards of snowflakes escape from the hand-held lines.

65 Q: Are these the only factors that can influence relative motion in space?

A: Probably not. Small particles of ice, for example, seem to be influenced by the sublimation of water [or fuel] molecules off their sunlit sides, that over a period of several minutes can slightly bend their drifting paths. The paths of larger objects, such as a dropped tool kit or discarded spacesuit, can be affected by escape of small amounts of gas or liquids trapped inside them. Ice particles in a swarm such as from a water dump can collide, sending them in different directions, and spinning ice particles can break apart, sending fragments off in widely different directions. It is truly weird out there, even without recourse to alien visitations.

66 Q: How can different dots appear at different times in the camera view?

A: Usually there is a short period during sunrise when many nearby objects ‘fade in’ simultaneously, and with the Earth horizon moving through inertial space at 4 degrees per minute [one full rotation every 90 minutes], the half-degree-wide solar disc takes 7-8 seconds to fully ‘rise’. This period can be followed by the random ‘fade in’ of singletons, presumably as they drift aimlessly out of the shuttle’s shadow [the speed at which they appear depends on how fast they cross the shadow boundary]. A good circumstantial argument that this shadow zone is the cause for the ‘fade ins’ is that rarely if ever does a video show a ‘fade OUT’ – which would require a dot to return into the shuttle’s shadow. Since the observed motion of most ‘dandruff’ shed by the shuttle was AWAY from it, this is completely consistent with the hypothesis of small shadowed objects randomly emerging into sunlight AFTER the shuttle itself has emerged from EARTH’S shadow.

67 Q: If the dots change motion due to thruster firing, how come the background earth/stars don’t shift as the shuttle’s orientation responds to the rotational impulse? Many observers confidently claim that the absence of any perceived motion is proof positive that no thruster could have fired.

A: This is a very common argument but it fails because nobody has actually ‘run the numbers’ on how MUCH the scene should shift due to a thruster firing. While it’s true that the shuttle can turn on its thrusters to achieve a rotation rate of up to two degrees per second or even more, in order to make major changes to its orientation, the far most common thruster firing is merely to trim its orientation against slow drift out of the allowable ‘deadband’ – usually several degrees wide. And such firings impart rotation rates far too gentle to be noticeable on the camera’s field of view.

Flight data shows how gentle such firings are. See http://www.jamesoberg.com/sts48.html for the actual orientation angles of the shuttle during the famous STS-48 zig-zag video. The thruster firing that occurred at precisely the time of the lower-left screen ‘flash’ was triggered by the autopilot sensing a pitch error exceeding the allowable range and pulsing the jet to correct it. The imparted rotation rate change was about one one hundredth of a degree per second [about half a degree per minute], which is so miniscule it obviously wouldn’t register on the field of view. This data has been posted on the Internet for many years but apparently people who still cling to the ‘angle-would-change-too-much’ excuse haven’t read it or understood it.

That tiny angular rate can be verified arithmetically. Just get the thrust of a vernier jet, assume a one-second pulse, place it the proper distance from the center of mass of the shuttle, assume uniform mass density for convenience, and use simple physics to determine the imparted angular rate. It will be reasonably close to the value readable off the telemetry stripcharts.

68 Q: What is missing from most of the ‘space UFO’ reports?

A: Two main features are absent in these kinds of reports. First, the exact time and date is usually omitted from videos, preventing any serious researcher from determining the context of the event and what was also going on aboard the shuttle. Second, what’s missing is usually a fundamental understanding of the space flight environment – motions of nearby particles, illumination conditions, vehicle activities that generate ‘stuff’ that can be seen. And actual eyewitness testimony is also non-existent.

69 Q: Why is this information missing?

A: Just a guess, but usually the poster doesn’t know enough about spaceflight to know it’s important. But in other cases, it’s possibly deliberate. The principle seems to be that the less one knows about real space flight, the more enthusiastic a believer one can be for ‘space UFO reports’.

70 Q: How did the years-long NASA study of lightning sprites contribute to the body of videos of ‘space UFOs’?

A: Once NASA had deployed its world-circling data relay satellite system (TDRSS) after return to flight from the ‘Challenger’ disaster, in the late 1980s, near-continuous TV downlink became possible. Atmospheric researchers such as Dr. Otha “Skeet” Vaughan began a special study of “Mesoscale Lightning”, which involved opportunistic use of exterior shuttle TV cameras transmitting images when the comm. channels were open [mostly when the crews were asleep and nothing else was happening on board]. Following each orbital sunset, one of the cameras was pointed approximately backwards down the shuttle’s orbital track and aimed centered on the Earth horizon. In near-total darkness, the camera’s optics automatically maximized the ‘gain’ – the equivalent of opening the iris to maximum. The sought-for images were to show brief very high very bright lightning pulses, the recently discovered ‘sprites’. The project collected hundreds of hours of night horizon views and was very successful at seeing such phenomena. And it saw other visual apparitions as well.

70Q: What other special instruments have flown?
TBS

71 Q: Do the Russians have similar experiences?

A: Indeed yes. Cosmonauts have reported seeing ‘fireflies’ on early Vostok missions, and other moving dots outside windows on Voskhod-2 and later. They look the same as the routine apparitions on US missions.

72 Q: Are there any unique aspects of cosmonaut reports of UFOs?

A: One particular feature of Salyut space stations in the late 1970s, and for Mir later, was a trash airlock. Canisters of waste were packed, installed in a chamber, and then vented to space. Several cosmonauts [e.g., Georgiy Grechko] recall being startled hours later when some of the bags were seen drifting back in the vicinity of the station.

73 Q: Has anybody else in space seen such stuff?

A: Other nationalities have flown on US and Russian spacecraft, both for diplomatic and commercial reasons. Recent commercial space travel has opened even wider access. Robert Bigelow’s pioneering space habitat development efforts included two prototype ‘Genesis’ modules that flew for years with exterior-mounted TV cameras. They apparently see the same ‘stuff’ – vehicle ‘dandruff’ – occurring on NASA flights.

74 Q: What unusual features of sunlight illumination in space contribute to artificially creating ‘space UFO’ videos?

A: The best example of such unearthly and unfamiliar conditions is what I call “twilight shadowing”, which can make small nearby sunlit particles appear to suddenly ‘appear’ or ‘disappear’ in the camera field of view. Normally, in daylight the shuttle is bathed in direct sunlight as well as reflected sunlight from Earth’s surface, which backlights the vehicle diffusely, filling in the down-sun shadows. But in the brief periods after orbital sunrise and before sunset, the shuttle is passing over a swath of the Earth that is still in darkness – and not reflecting any ‘back lighting’. This is the period when people down in those regions, whose skies are still dark, can see sunlit satellites passing hundreds of miles overhead. For several minutes at the end of Each night pass, a camera aimed in accordance with the sprite search experiment will see any nearby particles suddenly ‘appear’ at sunrise, and more may appear as they drift randomly out of the shuttle’s invisible shadow. Here’s a graphic of this effect: http://www.jamesoberg.com/sts-ufo-twilight-zone.PDF

75 Q: What does this have to do with ‘space shuttle UFOs”.

A: The connection is striking and the implications are profound. The BEST images of the most famous ‘space UFOs’ were seen during these rare, brief intervals of ‘twilight shadowing’. Far from being an unbelievable sequence of freak coincidences, this correlation is clearly a reflection of ‘cause and effect’. It shows that the lighting conditions most suited to observing sunlit near-shuttle small objects are exactly the conditions under which “UFOs” appear.

76 Q: How do you explain so MANY well-documented stories by reliable witnesses?

A: I’ve found the stories are much less well documented than usually claimed, and often the alleged witnesses – whatever their personal reliability – really had nothing to do with the stories that carried their names. I’ve addressed a few dozen individual cases in this section [link], and a few dozen alleged individual testimonials here [link tbs].

77 Q: How can you dare to disbelieve a true American hero such as Gordon Cooper.

A: I’ve researched his stories deeply, and found that his tales tend to get more dramatic with the years – a typical narrative effect. I’ve found many independent witnesses to both his pre-NASA stories [Germany and Edwards AFB] who all describe much less spectacular occurrences [writers who claim the stories have never been explained are ignorant of these research activities]. In other cases where Cooper recounted documented spaceflight experiences, he often added unreal dramatic details, possibly for audience satisfaction. Some fantastic stories can only be explained as designed to generously please his audiences – best example is his autobiography account of how he saved the space shuttle from a lethal design flaw by relaying a telepathic warning from space aliens.  Links TBD

78 Q: How can you dare to disbelieve a true American hero such as Edgar Mitchell?

A: I’m happy to accept Mitchell’s personal opinions on other stories he’s heard, but he has nothing to contribute to the ‘space UFO’ subject. I’m glad that there are some intelligent people trying to map the limits of human knowledge – and beyond – as he has done since his space career. When I analyze his published works, such as the report of his private ESP experiment on Apollo-14, I get the impression of a man so excited by the concepts that he may not bring sufficient skepticism and rigor to his criteria for credibility. His report on his ESP experiment, for example, strikes me as ‘ad hoc’ modification to the ‘success’ scoring criteria after the fact, to make essentially random results look significant by changing the rules after the game. I’m glad he had the boldness to conduct the experiment, but I’m not alone in concluding that a proper assessment of the results show nothing significant.

79 Q: But didn’t Mitchell say he saw aliens on the Moon when he accidentally blurted out “we have visitors” over an open mike during an Apollo-14 moon walk?

A: That’s the story on the internet. As you can discover by looking at the real transcripts, he was joking about messages left in his lunar equipment by the backup crew. He is quite clear he encountered neither aliens nor alien hardware on his spaceflight.

80 Q: tbs

81 Q: How can you dare to disbelieve the former director of the Apollo lunar photographic archives, Ken Johnston?

A: In my investigation, I discovered that Johnston performed honorable duties first in the USMC as a flight line electronics tech, and later as a NASA contractor during the Apollo program, first as a lunar module simulator technician, then a spacesuit test subject, and then as a shipping clerk for Apollo lunar samples. But records show that despite widespread current claims, he was never a pilot of any kind, never worked on the real flight vehicle LM testing, and never had any control authority over Apollo mission image archives. These accounts seem to involve considerable improvement with multiple retellings. Perhaps for similar reasons of ‘narrative enhancement’, he got into trouble years later in a NASA volunteer outreach program when academic credentials he had claimed on his CV could not be confirmed with the claimed originating institutions, and rather than modify his credential claims, he resigned [he was not ‘fired’ – that’s yet another exaggeration]. Any additional stories he tells that are at variance with what the Apollo program scientists have told, I have come to categorize in the same level of credibility as entertaining ‘war stories’.

82 Q: How about all the other witnesses?

A: I discuss most of them one-by-one in a different section, but what I’ve found is that the alleged quotations are usually garbled or entirely fictional. I’ve taken the trouble to track back to the people to whom such quotes have been attributed – a very rare procedure in this field.

83 Q: So what’s the most famous story from the ‘Moon Race’ era?
A: Apollo-11 landing encounters, probably. See http://www.debunker.com/texts/apollo11.html

84 Q: What’s the most famous UFO story from the shuttle era?
A: STS-48 in 1991, the ‘zig-zagger’. Thousands of websites and videos about this mysterious-looking dance of the dots. My explanation here: http://www.jamesoberg.com/99purdue-48-speech.pdf

85 Q: How many of the stories are outright hoaxes?
A: Not many, but a few. The oft-repeated ‘we still have the alien spaceship in view” comment looks like a prank by a radio amateur transmitting over a radio band where the actual air-to-ground was being re-transmitted for local listeners in Greenbelt, Maryland.

86 Q: Are any of the stories sparked by astronauts just horsing around?
A: Not many, but a few, including one of the most famous: Cady Coleman’s comment about an unidentified flying object. She later explained, and not long ago, re-explained to me in a face-to-face meeting, she was making a wise-crack about what a TV camera she was setting up inside the Spacelab module was showing. The downlink video shows her floating by her work console, with no outside view and no TV monitor in sight, so common sense should dictate that she had no outside view for any ’real’ UFO.

87 Q: Have you restricted your investigations just to events in space?

A: Events on human space missions, both American and Russian, are certainly my core interest, because of my pre-existing professional focus. But I’ve also looked at stories from ground personnel attached to NASA or other US space and missile programs, as well as some famous stories associated with unmanned programs. I’m not interested in debating whether probe photos of the Moon, Mars, or other worlds show non-human artifacts – that issue is well debated elsewhere.

88 Q: What is the response of the pro-UFO community that believes the videos are genuinely unexplainable? 

A: As far as I’ve been able to tell over the past decade, the response has been – absolutely zero. The correlation of the most famous shuttle ‘UFO videos’ with the rare post-sunrise shadow zone, which I discovered first because none of the earlier researchers bothered to try, is totally ignored in all new discussions and claims for such videos. Ufology’s coverup of this astonishingly suggestive result has been, to the best of my knowledge, nearly complete.

89 Q: Are you part of some paid ‘debunking’ effort?

A: What can I say? If I were, I suppose I’d falsely deny it. Usually I just retort that anybody who can provide me with the contract number and address to send my invoices will earn a 10% commission for all future payments. As a rule, people who make this accusation are just looking for a lame excuse to ignore my investigation results.

90 Q: Weren’t you paid by NASA to debunk the claim that Apollo was a hoax?

A: That claim has been thoroughly and expertly debunked for years. My project was different. In 2001 I was to write a monograph showing how schoolteachers could use their students’ interest in this rumor to teach genuine science and critical thinking. But the project got mocked in the mass media as a waste of money [one millionth of that year’s budget – imagine that!] and NASA cancelled it to avoid Congressional criticism.

91 Q: Are you some kind of knee-jerk “NASA defender”?

A: That’s the biggest joke of all. I’ve been one of NASA’s most dogged critics over the past fifteen years regarding what I saw as a decaying safety culture [I was a ‘whistle blower’ to Congress in 1997 about NASA’s poor safety culture, and left my work at the Johnson Space Center in Houston soon afterwards], a politicization of international programs for diplomatic intentions [see my book ‘Star-Crossed Orbits’], a public information policy of blaming workers rather than managers for slipups [I won a national magazine writing award for exposing the true cause of the 1999 Mars robot fleet debacle], and a clumsy news blackout on shortcomings of the Russian space program, for political purposes. I’m the only journalist to ever have been denounced by name in a NASA press release for a “wacko” theory that turned out to be closer to the truth than NASA’s official position.

92 Q: Have you ever been wrong about any of these cases?

A: Nobody with millions of words published over several decades has never been wrong, and I’m no exception. But I have a pretty good record. Critical reviewers have found an erroneous description of which cameras were used on Gemini-4, in a 35-year-old article, and a dropped “0” typo in my original prosaic explanation for the STS-48 zig-zagger published 20 years ago. In a ‘scene list’ of NASA “UFO scenes” produced thirty years ago I uncritically repeated a mistaken explanation by photo technician Don Pickard (“crescent Earth in the window” of Apollo-16), but later agreed the explanation was unsatisfactory – and then endorsed the undeniable NASA explanation it was the boom-mounted TV light. My original acceptance of the NORAD identification of the Gemini-11 fly-by satellite as Proton-3 was effectively argued against by Bruce Maccabee, and I’ve come to prefer Brad Sparks’s view that it was a recently-jettisoned package of spacewalk equipment. And they may be more, which I’ll be happy to consider when suggested by other serious investigators.

93 Q: Why don’t you solve all the other ‘shuttle UFO’ videos on youtube?

A: While there’s an almost unlimited series of dancing space dots on youtube, there isn’t an unlimited amount of time and effort at my disposal. Moreover, most of those postings omit critical information such as date and time of the event or the original recording, which precludes independent checking. I have published detailed prosaic explanations of what are widely considered the ‘best’ space shuttle “UFO videos” – on STS-48, -63, -75, and -80, and when those research results are accepted as definitive by consensus of UFO researchers, I’ll commit new efforts to others. But none of the others I’ve ever looked at seemed any more mysterious or unsolvable than these ‘best’ cases, which I believe I have solved already.

94 Q: If you don’t explain them ALL, doesn’t that allow for some of them to be “true UFOs”?

A: You’ve got the burden of proof completely backwards. To establish the extraordinariness of some phenomenon, it is the responsibility of the proponent to prove that no prosaic explanation involving known phenomena is adequate to account for the reports. The proponents for these stories involving UFOs thrive in a world view where they lack basic knowledge of what prosaic phenomena are characteristic of space flight, so their attempts to prove their cases never gets off the ground. The demonstration that these types of scenes CAN be generated by causes within current human knowledge is the summation result of my own research over the past several decades.

95 Q: If Ufology is so spectacularly wrong about this particular subset of UFO reports, how reliable can they be for other categories of reports?

A: These stories have been particularly difficult to get a reality handle on because their environment is so genuinely alien to all previous human experience. When you add in the propaganda value of piggy-backing on the high reputations of astronauts and the rest of the space program, the urge to look more deeply into the stories – to risk ruining their public relations value -- also may subconsciously be diminished. Nowadays I’m much less prone than I used to be to generalize from this unique subset to the quality of the entire body of cases.

96 Q: So the stories are all nonsense and should be ignored?
NO!! It’s because they might NOT be ‘all nonsense’ that they need proper filtering to focus on the important ones.

97 Q: What should people DO to concentrate attention on reports of potentially genuine value?
A: First, realize what IS ‘prosaic’ in space – it’s VERY different from what is normal on Earth. Characterize the ‘routine’ and be most alert for whatever breaks those patterns – but be aware that unusual stimuli might happen to look a lot like the normal stuff [and conceivably, could be done so deliberately]. Develop a set of techniques to apply to ambiguous perceptions – that is, know where to go for better information. Be prepared to be surprised, and be prepared to be forced to make guesses under conditions of uncertainty. And don’t let repeated disappointment with ‘false positives’ dissuade from staying alert to the next potential apparition, since the cost of a ‘false negative’ can be severe.

98 Q: What can people do to tighten standards of evidence for such stories?
A: Do what ANY good investigation demands. Talk to real witnesses, determine the context [especially including illumination conditions], and obtain records of other concurrent activities. Follow up with any ‘hearsay’ leads but check them out. Establish a timeline with accurate date, clock time, scene sequences. Recognize who the ‘usual suspects’ are and establish their alibis. Calibrate the credibility of repeat claimants. Seek opposing views deliberately, and make a habit of repeatedly asking whether one’s own interpretations are wrong. Don’t invest ego-defense and ego-strokes as support mechanisms for one’s point of view. Be open to any arguments but be suspicious of them all, particularly one’s own. Try to see your arguments from the point of view of possible disagreements. Keep your mind reasonably open, but don’t let your brain fall out.
Here’s an example of the kind of context data that’s helpful: http://www.jamesoberg.com/sts48.html

99 Q: Will space travelers ever come across evidence of ETI?

A: This will always be a possibility and is one possible explanation that should never be excluded. So far, the long list of likelier explanations have all turned out to be entirely capable of accounting for the ENTIRE range of human spaceflight experiences. But that’s no proof it will ALWAYS be that way.

Comments to jamesEoberg@comcast.net, please!