Burning Man seen 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 about 90,000 times, traveling at just under 5 miles per second, watching the sun rise once every 45 minutes. Occasionally, they see things out there in the dark. And occasionally, people down here do, too. Whether NASA likes it or not, the ISS is increasingly becoming a real H๏τbed for UFO hunters.
Last week, a piece of footage purportedly showing something appearing above the horizon became the basis for one of the most popular stories on this site in recent weeks. So what was it? And why do UFO hunters continue to claim that the ISS is more than it seems – even though, as almost everyone knows, this is largely a huge waste of everyone’s time?
“I saw some lights that looked like they were lined up and it was almost like an inverted check mark,” astronaut Leroy Chiao told HuffPost last year, of a famous incident during a spacewalk outside the ISS in 2005.
“And I saw them flying and I thought it was terribly strange.”
But no, it wasn’t aliens. Like several such “eerie sightings” by ISS astronauts over the years, this was a case of unsettling — but mistaken — idenтιтy .
“It wasn’t just one fishing boat, but a line of them spread 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 ISS’s long history.
The fact is that although “unexplained” or strange sightings of lights and even objects have been reported throughout the history of the space race, none of them have held any real weight as UFO “experiences.”
Since October alone, at least four UFOs have apparently been spotted outside the ISS. Earlier this year, someone even spotted a craft “docked” with the space station. Many of these typically pixelated, slow-motion clips are the work of famed UFO detective Streetcap1, who documents a large number of UFO sightings on his Facebook page and YouTube (he has nearly 10,000 subscribers), which are then collected by UFOSightingsDaily and — from time to time — reposted by sites like ours. And now they’re popping up all the time.
In a recent clip, NASA’s feed appeared to cut out just after a gray shape (presumably the Moon) emerged on the horizon. Streetcap1 said it was definitely not the Moon, but it turned out to be the Moon. Meanwhile, we wrote a short, skeptical post about it, and it ended up being shared on Facebook 60,000 times.
