Jim Oberg's "99 FAQs About Space UFO Videos"

[deuem]

I did some work on the photo planes and based on very lose ideas this is what I get. If I could get real data, I could give better data. So all of this is just an idea.

If I start with the tether 46 nm away in the full frame below. It will give me a picture window at 25 feet from the shuttle of about 33 feet.


This is pretty much wide angle at about 66 degrees. When I look at the print I can count 13 round objects that are not in focus at all but could be within that 33 foot window at 25 foot distance.
If there are ice crystals in the photo then the 13 are ice.
Now looking at the next photo from the same photo cropped to size, within that box I can see maybe 1 ball.



This photo is sized across the frame at 12 miles. I see no balls yet. Only after doing a zoom away from the large frame do the critters begin to show up. At the 12 mile make above the frame size at 25 feet off the suttle would be about 6-1/2 feet wide.

If I was to add up all the critters in the films and place them in the close film plane they would be everywhere. I would think the shuttle would be incased like a snowball.

If the astronauts see crystals at 25 feet, Ok say that is ok but the camera then zooms right past them and finds new items, most call critters. And what looks like many of them, up to 100 or more, hard to count.

What I am getting to is that it is very posible to have both. The crystals in the window they see and the critters the camera sees at 46 nm. Without the camera there would be no way their eyes could see that far and make out details. They would just see about what was in the first photo. Actually a bit less on a stare. More if moving the eyes back and fourth.

So if you were to ask them what they see they would say we see the standard dandruff that follows us and the tether out in space 46nm away. Looking at a monitor one would see the critters and think it is the ice outside and just blow it off unless one knew better about the camera.

This senerio can account for both sides of the coin. I would need very good details to make it Deuem proof but I think you get the idea.

Also at 160nm orbit altitude the shuttle should be in the Earths shadow for 145 degrees or 36.25 minutes per orbit. They can see a diameter of the Earth of 3,750km if they look down. So they can never see very much of the Earth at one time from that low.

The actual time it spends in total darknes is unknow by me as of yet. To many variables including the moon and surface light.

[ArMaP]

Swarm: In sunlight from the left. The tether looks to be casting a shadow also in space.





Nothing in any of the photos proves anything about the critters as of yet. It only looks like at this distance they are far away or very small nearby. If you look at pixel counts, they are very close to the tether counts. In conclusive at this point with these garbage photos.  Can one of you, hopefuly Jim pass on at least these 3 photos in a clear format photo?

I think that "shadow" of the tether is a good sign that what we are seeing is a camera effect, as I don't see any other explanation for the presence of that "shadow". As I'm not used to old video cameras I cannot really know if that type of "artefact" was common or not.

[deuem]

A little larger pic that shows more of the shadow or solar winds working on the tether



And while I was there I did a family portrait for NASA...



If I had better masters the finals would get better.

[JimO]

An important feature of the payload bay cameras was a pixel overbright protect that would 'gray-out' pixels that had too high brightness levels, sort of an overload reliever. You could see it in dazzling reflections off shuttle structure, off bright city lights at night, off lightning-lit cloud banks, even with defocussed star images that became 'donuts' [I recall a great pan across 'Orion' composed of such donuts]. There was one startling scene of dots drifting across a city passing below and they appeared to vanish behind the city, underground [I wish I had logged that so I could replay it].

What was happening was that when the brightness from the foreground dots was added to the already overbright pixel, it stayed grayed-out. It 'vanished behind it' to normal visual interpretation processes.

[JimO]

....
Jim says a NASA UFO video study don't matter. In space the video record of these shuttle flights make their cameras view...' the true retina of the space scientist'. Their images allow the eye to distinguish objects & their behavior in the vacuum of space for the first time & open to the scrutiny of all.....

Once again, Martyn says I say something I never did. I believe a study of space videos requires contextual information not solely derivable from the video alone. Other information such as camera direction, shuttle orbital position, shuttle activities, crew and MCC reports, must be assessed as well.

I don't know what Martyn thinks, but he writes as if he doesn't even care if the scenes are in daylight or darkness and seems to prefer that others don't know either.

Unless I've missed it, he still insists the sts 75 swarm video was made in darkness with self-luminous dots and tether. Have I missed anything?

[deuem]

Jim, I'm not sure at the moment with the prints I have to work with but if the camera had an overload gray spot pixel protection unit then I would expect it to eliminate very white hot centers as you stated. I need to think this over and more testing but I would first think that in the wide pan as I processed above if the crystals were close to the ship then they would all be in overload mode. The wide pan should have a shorter focus field.

If you wish to consider the centers of the objects the bright spots then why is there no gray dot? gray area? they seem to go black or empty. Say it pushes the pixel black then this only happens on the zoom where the camera gets closer to the objects focus. Even the tether shows a hole of pixels where there should be some. Does that gray dot eliminate that pixel? Looks that way.

Jim, if the shuttle was in constant swarm of ice or piss crystals, then there must be hundreds of photos of these through the years. Including space walks. Do you or Martyn have any nice photos of these I can test to see how they process. If the camera can catch 13 to a hundred of these in a 33 foot window then there has to be thousands of them surrounding the craft. Again this should be like a halo around the craft at times until they do a burn and move away.

Can you supply any better photos? or do I have to scrounge the net? I would prefer if it was your picture(s) that way I can't be told I changed it or made it up.

[JimO]

Deuem, here are several videos of water dumps that may be illuminating.

STS-130 Waste Water Dump Flight day 3
Ronsmytheiii

daytime dump, many scattered hunks crossing screen in all directions


water dumps


STS-125 Atlantis Shuttle Water Dump



Strange Liquid In The Space UFO



NASA STS-132 ufo's flying around during orbital sunset water dump

Note the shadow of the extended robot arm, onto the particle stream! Then after dump ends, scattered ice flakes tumble by. This shows that after a water dump of snow streaming away, some particle-particle collisions throw some particles back towards shuttle vicinity.


NASA STS-75 ROUTINE WATER DUMP/JETTISON SHORTLY BEFORE UFO SWARM

Exactly how soon before, poster does not say.


sts 39


sts 80

Shows 'overbright protect' feature with lightning bursts with blacked-out centers

[deuem]

Jim, as you may not know, The country I am currently staying in bans YouTube 100%. We have some ways of getting around it but it is very painful at times. If you could  add a tool like "Snapshot set in png mode and grabbed the best frame you could while watching UT, that would help. I could grab that photo off the forum and run it. Let me see what I can do.

Before I forget. What about that UV Camera, did you post it and I missed it? Is this the camera you are talking about the gray pixel counts or just the out-board Hi-8 cameras?

As you might have noticed on the tether pan view I processed, is this the invisible light you're talking about. I know Martyn is saying night time. With the shuttle doing 90 minute laps, and spending 36 minutes in the shade every lap, we would need to understand how long the swarm video is and where in the orbit it started at. If the video is over 54 minutes they hit shade. But I don't know if they found it in the light of day or dark of night. We need times.

Also I need to understand more about the tethers orbit height. In your NASA notes, day 8? they set it at 46nm from the shuttle and I have heard as much as 80+nm. Does anyone want to fill in this blank. If it is 46nm as on the data sheet and the shuttle at 160nm orbit then the tether  is at 160 + 46 or 206nm high?

If so then I need to calculate the day night ratio for the tether. Out another 46nm will give it a shorter night. I have to look at my math again but I did see a point where there is no more night, where the sunlight cone of darkness comes to a point. Way out there........

[JimO]

Sadly there is no 'one size fits all' answer for 'how high?' the tether was above the shuttle. When the tether broke the TSS-1R satellite was already 20 km above the orbiter, and the break threw it into a higher orbit [while the shuttle lost a proportionately very small altitude]. This orbit was elliptical, higher at one end then at the other.

The shuttle was moving faster in its lower orbit, and over many orbits it got far enough 'ahead' of the original relative position that it was actually overtaking the tether from behind -- it had 'lapped' the tether like a race car on a circular track. NASA calls this overtaking process "phasing".

The first time the shuttle passed beneath the tether was about 4 days and 4 hours after the break. And since the altitude of the tether varied by tens of miles every single pass around Earth, the absolute height difference could vary depending on at what point the fly-under happened to occur.

Even that does not tell you the range in the video, because visibility depends on orbital lighting conditions and if it was in Earth's shadow you wouldn't be able to see it, and in full daylight it would be difficult to observe because of glare from Earth's surface. So the best time to look with hope of success was near dawn and dusk. And since the relative speed was something like 250 mph [as I recall], even ten or twenty minutes from the fly-under point would be a significantly different range.

I expect that the ranges announced at the time were calculated ones and pretty accurate. But there is no easy layman's way of deriving that value.

You can derive a timeline from the scene list I posted yesterday, and see a series of sighting opportunities at different ranges at the 4 day 4 hr point, and then another series about four and half days after THAT when the shuttle 'lapped' the tether a second time.

I made a big issue of the timeline because the more common internet version of the event is to claim that the tether swarm video followed immediately after the break -- within minutes or hours. You can see from Martyn's response that he himself had no clue how long it was but didn't want to admit it.

But without a reliable timeline of position and lighting, it's my view that any attempt to reconstruct and assess alternate theories of the root cause, will be useless. That view, however, does not appear to be universally shared, and for some it seems the LESS one knows about the context of the video, the BETTER it is for conjuring up imaginative explanations. That's just not the process I'm familiar with.

[1967sander]

I have enhanced screenshots of the Tether using optical deblur techniques and what I discovered is that some these so-called "ice-particles" have attached themselves to the Tether. Tonight I will perform the same enhancement on the STS-75 video. This video has been run through super resolution software in order to get a clearer picture.
If these are indeed particles, as Jim claims, moving in front of the Tether than during the film sequence we should see them floating around and not attached to the tether. So if we can prove that these particles are not moving away from the Tether in any form but are stuck to the Tether we have our prove that these are not ice-particles.

[JimO]

Sander, first you would have to prove that your super-doper software wasn't enhancing noise and blur of an artifact-generated pixel field. You have familiarized yourself with the technical and operational characteristics of this camera as laid out in the Mission Control team's "Console Handbook", which I linked to, haven't you?

The issue of 'ultra violet' images seems to keep coming up -- there was such a camera in the payload bay [it wouldn't work if operated inside the shuttle since for crew eyeball protection the windows are opaque to UV] and all of its scenes are listed in the 'Scene List' document I've obtained. I can email that if anyone needs it. As I recall, none of the scenes involved the broken tether phase as far as I can tell but I can check again.

[1967sander]

Not super duper, just high end forensic software your own "agencies" use. Watch my other videos where I expose the Area 51 - UFO program. This is just the beginning. 

[deuem]

[it wouldn't work if operated inside the shuttle since for crew eyeball protection the windows are opaque to UV]

Jim, did'nt you mention to me that there was one window inside that they had a shade they could retract and go el-natural? I understand that the rest of the windows had protection. After you mentioned that I guesed they could use it to star gase while in the Earths shadow..

[JimO]

Jim, did'nt you mention to me that there was one window inside that they had a shade they could retract and go el-natural? I understand that the rest of the windows had protection. After you mentioned that I guesed they could use it to star gase while in the Earths shadow..

The Columbia [OV-102] had an optical flat UV transparent window mounted in the exit hatch on the middeck, designed for making high-quality celestial imagery with cameras attached to the inside of the door. The line of sight was -Y axis, straight out the port wing direction. The digital autopilot had a pointing option where you could specify any body-relative vector and point it at any celestial or earth surface or orbiting satellite direction, and it would hold that pointing vector to whatever accuracy you specified. The window normally had a UV-protective filter over it and without it, naked sunlight reflected off the walls would have induced eye damage in any crew in that deck within 30 minutes -- big no-no.

The hatch window had a fairly narrow field of view so it wasn't much good for sight-seeing. The overhead windows were much wider and they had cloth baffles if needed to put your head and camera into and block out all ambient cabin light.

Columbia was the only orbiter in the fleet with the special hatch window.

[WarToad]

Hey Jim, just saw you on "NASA's Unexplained Files".  I like how that show tries to find reasonable explanations, but is also willing to say "we just don't know" to some of the events.