UFO Evidence From SOHO Satellite

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.'"

Comments

Re:Who knew

[Jace of Fuse!]

Not really very amazing at all. UFO means unidentified. NASA probably see thousands of UFOs a day, but since they're probably just rocks or something, there's no reason to get all excited about a few objects that you found someplace where you expected you would find nothing.

Supposing this isn't some stupid scam, there's no doubt a simple explaination for what they've seen. They just probably aren't skilled enough to explain it, so their imaginations are running wild.

image filename: Disney.jpg??

[jungd]

The name of the image file on the page is Disney.jpg.

Hmmm.

UFOs, maybe, maybe not

[magi]

...in the sense of unidentified objects. A few arguments pop into my small amateur astronomer mind:

• It might be some dynamic physical or electric behaviour in the CCD or optics. The hardware is a few years old, after all, in extreme conditions. Might be water condensating on lenses, might be reflections from ice crystals, might be obscure electric charge dynamics on the CCD.
  
• SOHO is located in one of the 5 Lagrange points where it stays at same relative position with both Earth and Sun. Since this is an exceptional point, some space garbage such as rocks or space suit gloves might get stuck in the vicinity of the (unstable) point for some time.
  
• UFOs, as flown by some extra-terrestial intelligent beings, might generally be rather small objects. Space is big. SOHO's cameras do not have extremely good resolution and any visible object would have to be either enormous, very bright, or somewhat close to SOHO (and Earth), but between SOHO and Sun. Somehow that wouldn't seem to make much sense.
  
• Similar bright objects have not been observed from Earth based observatories, which would mean that it's a local phenomenom to SOHO. This would hint towards the first two possibilities above.

IANAA, IAAAA.

The term "flying saucer" was a 1947 accident

[sbjornda]

From An Aeronautical History of Flying Saucers":

It is important to bear in mind that the UFO phenomenon kicks off in 1947, in the form we now recognize, as a result of observations made by Kenneth Arnold over Mount Rainier. Paradoxically, Arnold didn't see "flying saucers," rather, he witnessed a formation of nine boomerang-like devices, or "D"-shaped with the straight section aimed backward (the reader will recall the comments made by Justo Miranda regarding this most aerodynamic shape). It was a journalistic error that assigned Arnold the term "flying saucer." What really matters is that the saucer myth spread quickly across the U.S., and then throughout the rest of the world.

Re:Cool video

[thasmudyan]

Yes, the video is pretty cool. But I don't think it's genuine. Here's why:

1. The girl is pointing to the tower and says something like "whats that". The reaction of the cameraman is to zoom right in until we see the craft hovering at the side of the building. I know *I* wouldn't have zoomed in instinctively at once if someone just said "look there".

2. Although the craft is moving *really* fast (exceeding 2000 kph in my opinion) the girl never looses track and continues to point to its exact location. I know that if *I* would ride a helicopter when a strange aircraft is passing by at ludicrous speeds (tm), *I* would be having trouble to track it in real time.

3. (now the most scientific point) Towards the end of the movie the aircraft passes in front of the helicopter at a speed of, say, at least 2000 kph. We can't be sure about distances here but let's say it's distance to the helicopter was 10 meters at its closest. Now: passing by in front of a brittle thing like a small mid air helicopter WITHOUT even making the helicopter shake a bit? Hell, the air draft alone (not to mention engine exhaust) should have gotten the heli into serious trouble at those speeds!

Mind you, I don't know a thing about aviation, that's probably why my analysis is wrong. Any pilots around here? I'd like to hear your opinion!

Take a look at the image closely.

[sbaker]

When I look at the image at the head of the linked page ("Disney.jpg" - curiously)
what I see is a VERY low resolution image.

Look at the red trail behind it. There are a bunch of little raster-aligned
four-pointed star shapes. (The one on the extreme left is a prime example).

This is what you get if you take a VERY low resolution image an blow it up
with simple bilinear blending between the pixels. Taking this as evidence
of the original image resolution, we can see that the 'spaceship' at the
righthand end of the image is just about 3 pixels across - but has been
false-coloured so that the bilinear blending has become magenta and yellow
bands. Those are not 'real' they are just a part of the false-colouring.

Isn't it suspicious that the "UFO" is exactly aligned with the raster?

This is a fake...well, perhaps not exactly a fake - but an intentional
mis-use of image manipulation to produce an image that was never really
there.

You could reproduce this image in GIMP in about 3 minutes flat.

1) Create a 20x20 RGB image.
2) Using a 1 pixel brush, paint a diagonal line using bright red.
3) Fatten one end of the line slightly.

At this point, your image (if you'd gotten it from a photo of the
night sky) wouldn't convince you that this was a UFO - would it?
It could be any kind of a trail, meteor, military jet on afterburner,
a flare, a firework, anything like that.

4) Increase the image resolution to 400x400

Notice how the 'tail' now looks EXACTLY like the one in the
ufomag web site. Look at the 'star' shapes in the tail.

So, now let's do some "false-colour enhancement":

5) Choose 'select by colour' - set the threshold down to nearly
zero percent and click on a region at the center of the 'head'
of the trail. Fill it with magenta.

6) Pick a pixel close to that, fill it with a nice lemon yellow.

Notice how your image looks startlingly similar to the one
on the ufomag website. All the artifacts present in their
image are present in yours.

Now, I'm not saying that they painted their image in GIMP,
I'm quite prepared to accept that it's a photo of a real
world night-sky object. However, the pretty pink and yellow
spaceship on the right - complete with spooky red glow and
engine exhaust is no more than a deliberately produced
artifact.

The yellow and pink regions are BOTH narrower than the original
pixel resolution - no feature narrower than TWO pixels wide
(Nyquist sampling limit) can ever be reconstructed from an
image.

Bah. BULLSHIT!!

Simple explanation

[titaniam]

This looks to me like an image of an ordinary star saturating the ccd (the cross), with some small portion of the exposure time suffering from a tracking problem (the diagonal smear). Many telescopes have a cross-shaped support for the imaging device within the light path, and what results is a cross-shaped diffraction peak around bright stars. Or, saturation of the pixels under a bright image bleeds out along the principal directions of the ccd. Notice how the cross is aligned with the up and down directions of the image?