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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.'"
A Small Office/Home Office satelite would do something the big commercial, governmental and scientific satelites couldn't! Amazing!
And when they come to Earth and systematically wipe us out one city at a time, one brave computer geek will upload a virus to thier mothership, and take the whole alien fleet out! They'll make movies out of this!
Oh wait, they already did...
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
Ill believe evidence of UFO's when the evidence isn't a link to a UFO-centric site.
Why has it become such that UFO = flying saucer?
A "UFO" is just an unidentified flying object. Anything whizzing through the air that I can't identify is a "UFO", whether or not it has anything to do with spacecraft from another world.
Sure, I know they are claiming that the so-called 'Slashdot Effect' has rendered it invisible, but do we have any independent witnesses? Any physical proof? No...
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
This article exemplifies the growing problem of apathy amongst the editorial staff of Slashdot. I'm disappointed, too, because I like this place.
Apple might go really bankrupt sometime and then we have no weapons left to use against them.
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)
The name of the image file on the page is Disney.jpg.
Hmmm.
/..sig file not found - permission denied.
Three words: you have no clue.
This "quantum pairing" doesn't allow passing of information.
Who is to say that a more advanced civilization would even bother communicating with Radio? That whole "Light Speed" limit kind of makes communication by this method rather worthless.
Even if you assume that that light speed is an absolute limit, there are good reasons not to use radio over any distance greater than a few hundred metres. The reason is simply efficiency: if you know more or less where the entity you want to communicate with is, why waste energy by broadcasting the signal on other directions? Over short ranges, broadcasting is good because it gives you freedom to move relative to a relay station, but between relay stations, hard links like optical fibre, or directional transmission by laser or microwave are the way to go.
This can explain also why SETI@Home haven't found anything. The period of time between an alien civilization starting to broadcast radio and then realizing that there were more efficient ways to communication would have to overlap with the period in which our civilization was listening for said signals. Not only that, but even if a civilization would have overlapped at 50 lightyears, if they happened to be 200 lightyears away, there would be no overlap. We are talking about mere decades out of millions of years. Maybe exactly the signals we were looking for passed us by just before radio invented.
Further, the limitation of lightspeed in communication is only really a problem if you assume that the users of it have to worry about time. I think it is reasonable to assume that before any civilization makes it any distance into space, they will have solved the problem of aging for themselves by whatever means.
I'm thinking of submitting one of these stories:
New slashdot headlines:
Britany Spears impregnated by CowboyNeal.
CmdrTaco blood is made of taco sauce.
Timothy's brain is removed and no one noticed.
Oh well thats why I keep reading slashdot you never know what is next.
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They
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!!
www.sjbaker.org
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?
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.