Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

UFO Evidence From SOHO Satellite

Posted by timothy on from the until-they're-identified-they're-unidentified dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "EuroSeti is set to reveal during the week of Jan 24-27 National Space Centre in Leicester, UK scientifically sound and verifiable evidence based on observations taken by the SOHO satellite and other satellites that indicate UFOs are present within our solar system. For the past two years, hundreds of extraordinary UFO-like images have been gleaned by a Spanish-based team using two space-based satellites. NASA initially tried to explain the images away as pixel faults, passing meteors or asteroids, etc., but when a European-led consortium presented them with images that clearly were none of the aforementioned, they 'clamped up.'"

2 of 749 comments (clear)

  1. I want to believe, but.. by dr_labrat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Somehow I think there might be another explanation:

    News story

    --
    The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
  2. I worked on the SOHO project... by Dr.+Zowie · · Score: 5, Informative
    ... and there have certainly been "UFO's" sighted in some of the images, in the strict sense of "unidentified flying objects".

    Most of them are attributable to dust thrown off by the spacecraft itself -- e.g. one of the instruments would close its door, and then another instrument would see loads of moving specks.

    Other streaks (like the one at the top of the linked page in the article) are often attributable to cosmic rays (often deliberately mistyped as "comic rays" by my cow orkers) or ionizing radiation from the Sun itself.

    The LASCO wide-angle coronal camera often sees stuff moving in strange directions -- most of that is sungrazing comets from the Kreutz family of comets.

    I work at the Southwest Research Institute now, and my coworker Dan Durda has done an extensive search through thousands of LASCO images for moving objects that don't fit the pattern of the sungrazing comets -- because he's interested in "vulcanoid asteroids", asteroids inside Mercury's orbit. He didn't find any, but I'm sure that any alien spacecraft jetting through the field of view would have tripped his algorithm.

    It's certainly possible that these guys have found something new, but remember that "UFO" doesn't necessarily mean "alien spaceship".

    Interestingly enough, SOHO itself registered as a false positive (caught by humans, fortunately) for the earthbound SETI algorithms. It's a strongish radio source that doesn't fit their earth-satellite pattern, since it's sitting at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point.