UFO video from the Space Shuttle?!? [Archive]

mtkafka

07-31-2002, 07:41 PM

Check this out! its a video from the Shuttle Discovery on Sept 15, 1991. What appears to be a UFO! This is real video, not a mockup! And there seems to be a missle fired at it too! Maybe SDI is really a anti Alien Threat operation!

http://www.qtm.net/~geibdan/videoclips/sts48.qt

What you think?

The Truth is out there!

I got it from this sight...

http://www.gpgwebdesign.com.au/astronauts.htm

etc

Jason McCullough

07-31-2002, 07:59 PM

http://www.gpgwebdesign.com.au/astronauts.htm#Streaming Video

Both videos here require, erm, special interpretation to be aliens.

It got me thinking about how the shuttle detects what's near it (space junk, aliens, evil superheroes), though. Is there some sort of space radar?

DennyA

07-31-2002, 08:16 PM

NASA and NORAD (whatever the new acronym for that is now) ground stations track all the space junk 24/7. They alert the shuttle and station if there's anything nearby. I've seen the shuttle change its orbit to avoid space junk while watching the live NASA TV feed online.

As for UFOs... I have NO doubt there has to be other intelligent life in the universe. Simply learning how many galaxies we know about, much less stars, should convince anyone. Why would animal life only form on this one planet out of the XXXillions of planets out there? ("Because Earth is God's Special Place. He created the universe around it.")

BUT... Given the amazing distances involved between planets, I'm unfortunately of the thought that any intelligent life form is likely to wipe itself out before it can travel to another habited system. (Unless human violence is an aberration?) And if they DID manage to come that far, would they really just sit in orbit trailing our primitive space vehicles and occasionally pop down to do an anal probe on a trailer park resident?

Aszurom

07-31-2002, 08:33 PM

Actually, that video isn't the best of the shuttle ones if it's the one I'm thinking it might be.

The BEST of them actually show lights descending from beyond the atmospheric bubble and going below and then above the clouds below. You can't call THAT anything but a fucking UFO. Not sure where this one is these days, but I'll find it for ya. At the end, one of the objects comes back out into space and the shuttle camera zooms way in on it and tracks it as it flies around. That ain't no "space junk".

Do I believe in UFOs? Ask me after a few beers and I'll tell you a story about little grey men.

Jason McCullough

07-31-2002, 10:47 PM

mtkafka

07-31-2002, 10:56 PM

I still have to question those movies from NASA shuttle. They are weird! They say its ice dust or something... but one of the 'things' does a 90 degree turn and for the faster!

WeIrD!

etc

Anonymous

07-31-2002, 11:11 PM

I'm in with Denny, though not about human aberration.

Trillions of galaxies, each with a trillion stars... and if we keep finding bacteria in the most inhospitable places on Earth (we're talking magma vents and underneath hundreds of feet of Antartic ice), then yeah, there's gotta be lots of weird stuff out there.

But.... the distances are just mind blowing. It takes light 4-5 years just to get from the Earth to the closest neighboring star. Or, to put it another way, it takes light 1.5 seconds or so to go from the Earth to the Moon. It took Apollo 3-4 days to travel that same distance. Do the math and it's daunting.

A civilization would certainly need some kind of ftl technology, and why bother building it if you're not going to say hi to the natives you encounter? And don't tell me they travelled trillions upon trillions of miles to carve apart some cows.

My favorite riff on this is from Kids in the Hall, where they're playing aliens who have abducted a human.

Alien: Oh, come on! I mean, we've been coming here for 50 years and performing anal probes and all that we have learned is that 1 in 10 doesn't really seem to mind.

Anonymous

07-31-2002, 11:24 PM

From what I understand it's a piece of space debris reacting to an orbiter burn.

People believe and see what they want to believe and see. I've seen aircraft on a perfectly normal day do some funky stuff that if you leave it to your imagination you'd think it was a UFO.

For instance, I watched a helo take off from Bell Textron a few months back from my office window and watched it do box patterns. From my angle, straight on one edge, the helo looked like it was stopping completely in mid-air and rose and dropped, then quickly accelerated in the opposite direction. I couldn't even tell it was a helo, just assumed it was since that's where the plant is and where they test stuff. Now just think that it had a navigation light on (or an aircraft landing light) and it was at night.

People see huge football-field wide circular UFOs on some STS film when ice crystals or a fleck of paint gets between the camera and the tail fin. The fact that you can still SEE the fin through the crystal suddenly means the crystal is BEHIND the fin, making it gigantic. It's the same argument those anti-moon landing morons pose when saying the aiming crosses are missing from some on-the-moon astronaut shots.

Saying all that, yeah, I believe that at some point we've been visited.. I've gone that far off the deep end. There are some interesting and notable cases that stand against most arguments. And yeah there's probably a conspiracy or two to shush it up, only because the government(s) probably knows slightly more than the rest of us. But no, there ain't no Roswell, no Zeta Reticulans (more aptly put, no Greys, I dunno there could be life on the two Zeta Reticulis), no MJ-12 Majestic, no Hanger 18 UFO parts, no Aztec, NM, no MIB (invented as a hoax/scam), no blah.

--- Alan

Ben Sones

08-01-2002, 05:29 AM

But.... the distances are just mind blowing. It takes light 4-5 years just to get from the Earth to the closest neighboring star.

Actually, it takes *light* 4-5 years to travel between Earth and it's nearest neighboring star (Alpha Centauri, approximately 4 light years-plus-change away). Since travelling the speed of light is somewhat problematic, a spaceship would take much, much longer than that.

Anonymous

08-01-2002, 08:20 AM

Hey, Ben, what's with the correction?

That's Exactly What I Said!

DavidCPA

08-01-2002, 08:33 AM

Hey, Ben, what's with the correction?

That's Exactly What I Said!

I think Ben was going to the point of light coming a star to the Earth rather than vice versa. Though since the Earth does reflect light you may still be technically correct.

-DavidCPA

Dave Long

08-01-2002, 08:47 AM

From where I'm sitting, this...

It takes light 4-5 years just to get from the Earth to the closest neighboring star.

and this...

Actually, it takes *light* 4-5 years to travel between Earth and it's nearest neighboring star

...say exactly the same thing.

--Dave

Mark Asher

08-01-2002, 08:51 AM

It's pretty much a tautology that intelligent life has to exist somewhere; there's just too many stars. They'd definitely have to have FTL to bother visting, though.

I'll start listening to UFO siteings when we figure out how to break the speed of light.

You could have a race a million years older than us who have more or less figured out how to live forever. What do you do? Maybe you build big motherships and just take forever to fly around the galaxy to look at stuff because that's all that's left to discover. Maybe they "sleep" until they get to the next star and then wake up and check things out.

Or you could have races from nearby stars who have natural lifespans of thousands of years. Maybe a 100 year roundtrip from their planet to earth is trivial.

Ben Sones

08-01-2002, 09:03 AM

Actually, I just misread your post. I saw "it takes 4-5 years to get to the nearest neighboring star." Not really sure why, especially since I also quoted that line (and correctly). My brain's not functioning yet, I guess. I blame it on the heat.

Reeko

08-01-2002, 09:06 AM

You could have a race a million years older than us who have more or less figured out how to live forever.

Excuse me, I believe we've already figured that out ourselves.

http://www.alexchiu.com/

Ben Sones

08-01-2002, 09:14 AM

Amazing. You learn something new every day. For instance, at Alex Chiu's website I learned that;

"The reason why a person gets healthier if his or her magnetic flux increases is that blood circulation is directly proportional to magnetic flux. Our body circulates blood with its natural turbine, magnet flux, which consists of no moving parts but yet still propels blood into the blood circulatory system. My Eternal Life Devices enhance up the blood circulation of the entire body by having North and South poles on top and bottom of the small fingers of both hands, or on toes of both feet! The magnetic devices speed up the magnetic flux that cycles in our body and therefore affects our blood circulation system. Weak metabolism means that energy and food that are delivered by our blood do not reach cells fast enough! Cells are dying faster than they are reproduced due to the lack of energy and food sources that slow blood circulation initiates."

Who'd have thunk it? We never talked about magnetic flux in high school biology class. I smell a coverup...

Jason McCullough

08-01-2002, 10:39 AM

Dean

08-01-2002, 12:29 PM

That actually sounds plausible, as I figure we'll inevitably figure out virtual immortality ourselves. The anal probing and cow humping still makes no sense, though.

Maybe they were very pretty cows.

Derek Smart [3000AD]

08-01-2002, 01:12 PM

Ladies!!! Signs opens tomorrow. Thats the closest we're ever going to get to the Greys. And I believe MNS over NASA. So there. :lol:

I once believed that I could jump out of perfectly good aircraft and feel good about it.

....until it was time to pull the cord

Yeah, I believe in intelligent life alright. 'e just ain't my next door neighbor.

Oh, btw, it won't take that long to travel to Alpha Centauri if those time wasting bastards at NASA (and their Russion counterparts) would just build a frigging jump gate. Why do I have to think of everything? See, here's the proof (http://www.3000ad.com/fleets/db/pics/galaxy_map.jpg)!! Its just as jen-u-wine as that shuttle video in the first post of this thread.

Bub, Andrew

08-01-2002, 01:13 PM

Hmmm... in Civ2 it only takes 15 years to get to Alpha Centauri.

Derek Smart [3000AD]

08-01-2002, 01:21 PM

Hmmm... in Civ2 it only takes 15 years to get to Alpha Centauri.

See what I mean? We game developers have to thinking of everything. sheesh!

Toddy

08-01-2002, 09:01 PM

Speaking of little green men, has anyone here seen the pics supposedly taken by the Russian Phobos II Martian probe before it went dark in the early 1990s? First they show a huge shadow, moving across the Martian surface. Then they show what looks to be an object coming toward the probe. Then the probe itself vanished.

That Dean Stockwell unexplained mysteries-type show had a feature on this a couple weeks ago on the Space channel here in Canada. Some interesting comments were provided by the Russians who put the probe up, and the pics are hard to explain. The earlier one clearly shows a long, cylindrical shadow on the face of the planet that must have been caused by something in orbit. Russians had no explanation for it. Also, some of the heat-sensitive pics registered lines in a grid on the surface of the planet that were much warmer than their surroundings. Again, they had no way to explain this.

Here's a link that I just found:

http://www.skiesare.demon.co.uk/phob.htm

Jason McCullough

08-01-2002, 09:37 PM

It looks like a meteor.

Toddy

08-01-2002, 09:45 PM

The shadow sure as hell doesn't. Seems to be between the probe and the planet, meaning that it's either in the low atmosphere or attached to the planet somehow. Also, it's moving slowly. That and the heated grid on Mars shown in the infrared pics are flat-out weird.

Dave Long

08-02-2002, 08:43 AM

This is all fascinating stuff. I always find myself drawn in by UFO info but won't take the time to search it out. Thanks for all the links!

--Dave

Anonymous

08-02-2002, 12:56 PM

As far as the elliptical shadow goes, a small shadow centered on the ellipse, gyrating from side to side and slightly less up and down can create an elliptical shadow like that.

As far as the IR images go, any kind of external noise -- vibration, extreme heat, rapid temperate changes, radiation, and mechanical problems -- can cause geometric patterns to arise from imaging.

Fun stuff to speculate on though.

--- Alan

Toddy

08-02-2002, 01:10 PM

Yet those explanations weren't forthcoming from the Russians, or many others who looked at the pics. The general consensus seems to be "Duh, I dunno." Or maybe I've just been watching too much Dean Stockwell. I think it's the fedora.

Anonymous

08-03-2002, 10:05 AM

Yet those explanations weren't forthcoming from the Russians

Russians aren't very smart.

Jason Cross

08-05-2002, 12:11 AM

One quite convincing argument for why there are no extraterrestrial civilizations is the Fermi Paradox:

http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~transhumanism/Fermi.htm

To put it succinctly: if there are other techilogical civilizations out there, then where is everybody?

If there's intelligent life out there, it should have taken only 5-50 million years to colonize the entire galaxy, given a very conservative diffusion model. In galactic terms, that's pretty short.

Either there's nobody out there, or by some almost impossible chance, not even ONE technological civilizations sprung up prior to, say, 10 million years ago. Which, given the size and age of our galaxy, is almost unthinkable.

Do a google search on the Fermi paradox, it's interesting reading.

Jason McCullough

08-05-2002, 02:13 AM

Ok, Fermi's paradox is the creepiest thing I've heard about aliens in a long time, and it's seriously wigging me out.

Out of the premises, I pick......"colonization should fill the galaxy" as the one being wrong. There's got to be some unknown block to the first mover colonizing everything.

Augh, my head.

Jason McCullough

08-05-2002, 02:29 AM

Here's an interesting possibility:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/astro-ph/9901322

An astrophysical model is proposed to answer Fermi's question. Gamma-ray bursts have the correct rates of occurrence and plausibly the correct energetics to have consequences for the evolution of life on a galactic scale. If one assumes that they are in fact lethal to land based life throughout the galaxy, one has a mechanism that prevents the rise of intelligence until the mean time between bursts is comparable to the timescale for the evolution of intelligence. Astrophysically plausible models suggest the present mean time between bursts to be $\sim 10^8$ years, and evolutionarily plausible models suggest the rise of intelligence takes $\sim 10^8$. Hence, this model suggests that the Galaxy is currently undergoing a phase transition between an equilibrium state devoid of intelligent life to a different equilibrium state where it is full of intelligent life.

DennyA

08-05-2002, 02:42 AM

Oh, bullpuckey on the Fermi Paradox. Why would we have "noticed" when we only invented even the basic radio telescope a few decades ago? Heck, we've only gotten to the point where we can detect extrasolar planets within the past few years -- and even that's just by detecting their gravitational influence. So how would we "notice" a space empire?

As for why they haven't been here, with 10^10 to 10^20 inhabitable planets in our galaxy alone, what are the odds that they would have gotten around to stopping here?

I think about the only thing you can logically extrapolate at this point in our technological growth -- and remember, we've only even had radio and engines for a about 100 years, so space shuttles and nukes aside we're still primitive -- is that nobody in the immediate neighborhood has solved the faster-than-light problem.

And if it turns out that FTL travel IS an impossibility, that does even more to explain why we haven't detected life out there.

And it could be something so simple as aliens popping up here 1,400 years from now going "You were using radio to communicate? RADIO? You idiots. No wonder you weren't answering."

With endless kazillion planets out there, to think that "intelligent" life has popped up as a unique thing on earth is ludicrous. It's like an alien sending a probe to earth, examining a single molecule of a single grain of sand in the Nevada desert, and concluding there's no sentient life here.

Jason McCullough

08-05-2002, 03:06 AM

The thing I thought was creepy about the Fermi paradox is that aliens should have, assuming they're interested (and with the numbers, at least one of them should have), already colonized the earth themselves. With the time scales involved, it's like arguing water won't eventually fill every bit of a bathtub if you leave the faucet running for (a virtual) eternity.

Toddy

08-05-2002, 09:18 PM

It is pretty interesting, although like so many other scientific theories about life developing apart from Earth it assumes that we have a clue what's going on. And there is no guarantee that we do. Any race intelligent enough to have colonized/travelled across much of the galaxy would certainly have the technology to isolate us in this solar system.