UFO mission STS-75

    Space Shuttle STS-75 was unlucky at least twice. At first, many years before the start, some pranksters invented a “report on checking sexual positions in zero gravity” , for the sake of clarity, they put a fake mission number from the future. By chance, this number was STS-75, whose crew was purely male. Then, already during the flight, a routine live broadcast with the MCC, which showed a torn off satellite on a cable, became very famous "evidence" of UFO sightings. We are unlikely to prove anything to convinced conspiracy theorists , but you must admit that we are curious to find out how the experiments on board, the imperfection of video equipment and a bit of physics created the myth of observing aliens.


    Round UFO, frame from STS-75 video

    The imagination and industriousness of people who believe in UFOs are enough to stabilize the video, draw the paths of objects, apply artful filters and count the ripple period. How can one not believe in aliens after such a video?



    But let's take a look at the original video. What is happening there? A few days before the shooting, when the cable was unwound, it broke, and the satellite flew away. But, since the satellite with the cable remained in a similar orbit, they regularly flew close to the shuttle, they could be observed, photographed and filmed. And so, when the distance between the shuttle and the cable was about one and a half hundred kilometers, astronauts Franklin Chang-Diaz and Claude Nicole took a camera and began to take the cable during a communication session with the MCC on live television, that is, they took a picture on the ground and could with them communicate, and the viewer’s voice was still added to the commentator. Let's see the original video without processing (from 2:48)



    Strange, but the negotiations do not contain any surprise or excitement from meeting with the unknown.

    Franklin: get the image inaudible?

    MCC: Franklin, we see a long line, something like stars, and a lot of something floating in the foreground. Can you describe what you see?

    Franklin: The long line is a cable, and we have a little trash that flies with us, the Sun illuminates it, at such a small angle, a lot of diffused light, Claude is trying to set up the camera.

    MCC: Accepted.

    So, for astronauts, moving points in the foreground are trash flying next to the shuttle. Where did he come from? The answer is simple. First of all, the shuttle toilet is arranged so that solid waste was stored and returned to the ground, but liquid waste was dumped overboard directly into space with a special system. Secondly, specifically in this mission, experiments were conducted with an additional discharge of water. Therefore, the shuttle, which did not change its orbit, was surrounded by a huge number of small ice floes. Astronauts in a post-flight press conference show a very beautiful discharge of fluid and flight frames surrounded by particles of flickering ice (from 2:04)



    Why is the picture so bad? In the yard in 1996, they have not yet come up with a good technique that would shoot a color picture in HD quality and send it right there through a relay satellite. Of course, the aliens decided to take advantage of this and fly around until people can take pictures of anti-gravity patterns on the lining of the flying saucer.

    So let's say we really see the trash. But how did he turn into circles with holes in the center and some recesses on the sides? If you have a mirror or mirror-lens telescope, then you could already guess. For example, in my Newton’s reflector, I observed such “plates” dozens of times, only I had them with a thick “leg”. If you point the telescope at a bright star and defocus it strongly, then instead of a star you will see the surface of the main mirror. And the black circle in the center is a secondary mirror.


    “Leg” - mounting a secondary mirror

    Honestly, I could not find the specific model of the camera and lens that were used in that flight, but the mirror-lens lens, which is logical to use for shooting distant objects, will give just such a picture for point objects when defocusing.


    An example of a mirror-lens lens

    The video clearly shows how, in difficult shooting conditions, the operator changes the degree of zoom and focuses the lens on a cable that is more than a hundred kilometers away. A close small and bright piece of ice in such conditions will be out of focus. The protrusions on the periphery of the UFO are, obviously, the mountings of the main mirror. If you still do not understand the mechanism, a visual experiment is shown in the UFO Hunters History Channel episode dedicated to this event (from 5:41)



    If you were careful, you might have noticed that the close “UFO” passes as if behind a cable. So it can’t be near? Not. Video filmed under difficult conditions of abundance of scattered light is overexposed (overexposed). The objects in the frame are brighter than in reality, and the illusion of their incorrect position relative to each other may appear. Astronauts of the Apollo program on the Moon similarly suffered, appearing as if inside a camera between a layer of film and crosses drawn in front of the film. The experiment with the overexposed frame and the different position of the fishing line in reality and on the monitor can be seen in the video above (from 6:50).

    Well, and probably the last question that may arise - why do UFOs flicker? There may be several answers to this. Most likely, the ice just spinning. In those moments when the camera reduces the zoom and changes focus, the pieces of ice become almost dots, and it is clear that some of them retain flicker. But there is another option - those who remember monitors and TVs with cathode ray tubes know that to the naked eye the screen does not seem to flicker. But if you photograph a working monitor on the camera, you will see a running strip - the camera is different from the eye and manages to notice the operation of the scan system. The initial video was most likely shot not on a digital matrix, but on a videocon - the matrices were already in 1996, but they were used almost exclusively in cameras. The original signal was most likely recorded on magnetic tape, and then digitized to get to YouTube. In conditions when the video has changed several formats and types of media, I will not be surprised at any flicker.

    A couple of years ago, I substituted the parameters I liked in the Drake formula, and I got that there should be about 3,000 alien civilizations in the galaxy. But, fortunately or unfortunately, we have not yet recorded any reliable evidence of their existence.

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