We UFO nuts are always looking for evidence that will finally convince everyone that we are being visited by extraterrestrials. (It seems thousands of eyewitness accounts are not enough. Sheesh!)

Well, how about a movie from NASA that clearly shows a swarm of UFOs clustering around something we put in space? And how about if some of those UFOs could be proven to be at least a mile wide? That ought to do it!

So imagine how intrigued I was when I saw the video below.

The straight object is a 12-mile-long tether that was released from the Space Shuttle Columbia in a 1996 experiment. It is shown floating about 81 nautical miles (93 standard miles) away. Toward the beginning of the video, you can see the UFOs appear (from another dimension!?) and swarm around the tether. NASA claims that the objects are debris and ice particles, but take a look at times 1:15 and 1:30 of the video. You will see theses alleged ice particles pass behind the tether. That means that if the objects’ diameters measure, say, 1/12 the length of the 12-mile-long tether on your screen, then the objects must be at least a mile wide!

The tether, by the way, was a cable designed to allow measurement of several factors important in space flight. Although it was 12 miles long, it was only 0.85 millimeters in diameter, allowing it to fit on the space shuttle. It broke free of the shuttle a little prematurely, but succeeded in proving the existence of UFOs once and for all!

Are you excited yet?

I was, too, but there was one thing that bugged me. You only have to watch the first 12 seconds of the video to see what it is. Can you guess it?

Really! You have all the clues. What is wrong with the picture?

Here’s what didn’t seem to fit for me: if the tether is 12 miles long and less than a millimeter in diameter, why does it appear to be so fat? Clearly that must be due to a strong reflection from the Sun, or other optical anomaly, combined with the fact that we’re talking 1996 camera technology.

So, I Googled for UFO tether incident debunked and clicked to this video:

It points out that when the camera focused more sharply on the tether, the UFOs went out of focus. “So what?” you ask. Remember that the tether was over 90 miles away. At that distance, the tether would be most in focus when the focus was set to “infinite.” At that setting, anything farther away than the tether should also be in best focus. Yet the UFOs go more out of focus as the tether goes into better focus. Therefore, they can’t be farther away.

Evidently the optical effects on the cable were so strong that they overwhelmed the out-of-focus ice and dust particles in the foreground, making them appear to go behind the tether.

Darn!

The kicker was the following video, starting at 0:40. It shows how a small light source can look exactly like the UFOs in the tether incident, when the camera puts it out of focus. You can read a lot more if you go to YouTube and search for the video by title, Camera artifacts of the type found in STS-75 tether footage, and then read the text below the video.

So in the end I didn’t get to prove that UFOs exist (I’m still working on that!), but I did get two more truth-loving tests to add to my collection.

A UFO Nut’s Truth-Loving Tests:

1) A truth-lover will not ignore little facts that don’t fit. 2) When an interpretation of the facts favors his pet idea, a truth-lover will search for ways to debunk that interpretation.

Other Truth-Loving Tests in the collection:

There are actually two more truth-loving tests in this story, but they deserve a separate post. Stay tuned!