Page 64 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - Febrary/March 2020 Edition

64 NASA Engineer Debunks UFO Sightings

This Former NASA Oberg told Giaimo. "But we're still a local very long.
civilisation. Moving beyond our neighbourhood And if the spacecraft is in the right
Engineer Has Debunked has been visually confusing." position in relation to the Sun, it can also cast its
Some of the most common sighting he shadow onto these objects to make them
Pretty Much Every Online
has to debunk are to do with NASA astronauts disappear and reappear, which is known as
UFO Sighting reportedly seeing UFOS and being forced to 'twilight shadowing'.
keep silent, which Oberg says is a result of us
watching too much sci-fi and not really That weird Californian flare across the night
by FIONA MACDONALD understanding what space really looks like. sky
"I've had enough experience with real
spaceflight to realise that what's being seen in At the end of 2015, people in southern
You've probably seen more than your fair share many videos is nothing beyond the 'norm' from California freaked out when they saw a bright
of stories about UFO sightings. An astronaut on fully mundane phenomena occurring in white light shoot across the night sky.
the ISS just has to catch footage of a fireball unearthly settings," Oberg writes over on his But, as was cleared up pretty soon after
shooting across Earth's skies, and conspiracy site. the incident, it was actually the result of a
theorists have a field day. Whether it's clouds Here are some of the more common planned, unarmed missile test by the US Navy.
that look like spaceships or rogue meteors, the reports you might have seen on the interwebs, That strange looking trail of light was the plume
internet loves a good alien conspiracy. and Oberg's explanation of what's really going of particles blasted out by the rocket thruster.
But former NASA engineer James Oberg on: So why did it look so creepy to everyone
has taken it upon himself to trawl through all the else? Because here on Earth, we're used to
sightings and stories out there and politely UFO sightings at the International Space seeing thin vapour trails left by planes, or
debunk them, using science. Station billowing smoke plumes. But most of us have
The conclusion? Most of your "insane rarely (if ever) seen anything so big and sharp as
UFO sightings" are little more than 'space The real story? Space dandruff, which are things this.
dandruff', or your brain misunderstanding of that have shed off space vehicles during flight, "There were thousands of people who
what space travel actually looks like, says like ice flakes, paint chips, or fragments of were absolutely processing their visual stimuli
Oberg. insulation. They're different to space junk, correctly if [the plume] was a mile away or 10
As Cara Giaimo from Atlas Obscura because they don't pose a real threat to miles away [16 km]," Oberg told Atlas Obscura.
reports, after working at NASA mission control spacecraft, Oberg explains on his site. "But it was 300 miles [482 km] away, up in
in the late '90s, Oberg went on to become a space and sunlit, which never occurred to them,
space journalist and historian. It wasn't until a These flecks of dandruff are pretty because this is not something within the normal
few years ago that he started to take UFO common, but the reason they look so weird to us range of human experience."
sightings seriously. is that we're not used to the way these objects All of this isn't to say we should give up
His goal isn't to simply crap all over true look when they fall while the space station is on sharing our UFO sightings, or assuming that
believers - he calls that "stomping on dormice" - travelling through space. everything is 'normal'.
instead he's interested in teasing out exactly It's the same reason why people see so "It's good to keep scanning space video
what's going on in these images and videos, and many UFOs in the footage filmed by the for possible anomalies and reporting them
trying to figure out why people are reacting so cameras attached to NASA's old space shuttle quickly," Oberg told The Huffington Post back
strongly to them. missions. in 2013.
His hypothesis? Our human senses are so In these videos, people usually freak out "The reason is, there is always a real
used to focussing on relatively slow-moving because the spots seem to dance in and out of chance that it could be a genuine anomaly, either
objects, as well as certain light and atmosphere view, or suddenly appear and disappear. Which a spacecraft malfunction or other threat,
conditions, that when things change, our brains is pretty creepy if you're sitting at your computer expected or unexpected. In the past, missions
get confused. on Earth, but isn't that weird if you're on a space have failed because a clue that should have been
"Our sensory system is functioning shuttle travelling 28,000 km/h (17,500 mph) - seen out the window was overlooked." []
absolutely perfectly for Earth conditions," nothing's going to stay in your frame of vision