Burning Man from above.
Humans have been in continuous orbit aboard the International Space Station for 14 years and 85 days.In that time 216 individual astronauts from 15 nations have circled the Earth around 90,000 times, travelling just shy of 8km a second, watching the sun rise once every 45 minutes.Occasionally, they see stuff outside in the dark. And occasionally, so do people down here.Whether NASA likes it or not, ISS is increasingly becoming a real focus for UFO hunters.
Last week a piece of footage supposedly showing something rising above the horizon became the basis for one of the most popular stories on this website in recent weeks.So what was it? And why do UFO hunters keep claiming that ISS is more than it appears – even though, as almost everyone knows, this is largely a huge waste of everyone’s time?
“I saw some lights that seemed to be in a line and it was almost like an upside-down check mark,” astronaut Leroy Chiao told HuffPost last year, about a famous incident during a space walk outside ISS in 2005.
“And I saw them fly by and thought it was awfully strange.”
But no, it wasn’t aliens. Like several such ‘eerie sightings’ by ISS astronauts over the years, this was a case of disquieting – but mistaken – unidentity.
“It wasn’t just one fishing boat, but a line of them strung out along the South American coast,” Chiao said. “That’s why it looked like five lights from the ISS.”
Chiao’s story is similar to several incidents in the long history of ISS.
The fact is that while ‘unexplained’ or weird sightings of lights and even objects have been reported throughout the history of the space race, none have ever held any real weight as UFO ‘experiences’.
When astronaut Chris Cassidy saw a UFO floating past his window in 2013? That was an antenna cover. When Italy’s Samantha Cristoforetti reported an “almost alien” presence outside the space station, she was commenting on the sunshine and not an actual alien. And no, slightly pausing before answering a UFO question is not the same thing as saying you saw one.
As it turns out, all the reports by ISS astronauts of aliens’ fall into the same problems as those seen by other space travellers. Like the time Gemini IV pilot saw a rotating white cylinder in space? (A rocket booster.) The circular ‘objects’ that approached the Space Shuttle in 1996? A video illusion. And no, there weren’t any aliens outside the Apollo 11 capsule, despite some poorly-worded quotes indicating the contrary.
