Did International Space Station astronauts just see real UFOs?
Guess who’s coming to dinner? It might be aliens!
On August 19, 2020, a Russian cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) shared footage of what he describes as “space guests”, or UFOs, that made an unexpected appearance in a time-lapse video he recorded of the southern lights.
While passing over Antarctica & Australia, Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner was recording video of aurora australis but he managed to catch something unexpected. The one-minute video he captured appears to show potential UFOs. Vagner published the video in a tweet Wednesday morning.
“In the video, you will see something else, not only the aurora,” he teased in the post.
Southern lights–show
In the video, the glowing curve of the Earth & the green of the aurora moving across it are visible. In a subsequent tweet, Vagner directs his audience to look closely at the nine to twelve second–mark in the video to spot the UFOs, a string of four to five lights arranged in a diagonal line.
“Five objects appear flying alongside with the same distance,” Vagner wrote in further tweets. “What do you think those are? Meteors, satellites or . . . ?” Since the video was shot in a time-lapse, the flash of “objects” which quickly appear & disappear in the video actually lasted around fifty–two seconds.
Vagner did not claim to see the phenomenon as it happened, and no one else aboard the ISS has acknowledged it. He also did not indicate exactly when the footage was captured. Whatever the phenomenon was, it does appear as a string of lights arranged in a clear, angled line in the video.
Russian response
Vagner flagged the video to Roscosmos management, and said that it’s currently being examined by experts at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Central Research Institute of Machine Building (TsNIIMash) & the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences for further analysis.
Roscosmos spokesperson Vladimir Ustimenko has confirmed that the video is under review, according to the Russian news agency TASS.
“It is too early to make conclusions until our Roscosmos researchers & scientists at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences tell us what they think,” Ustimenko said. “It was decided to hand over those materials to experts, who will tell us what that was in their opinion.”
Serious sightings
Aliens & UFO sightings have long been poo-pooed as topics for people in tinfoil hats. However, the subject has slowly crept into the mainstream in recent years, particularly after the New York Times revealed that the U.S. government-funded research into the topic for several years and that the research was ongoing.
One former contractor told the Times that he’d briefed Pentagon officials on the retrieval of “off-world vehicles not made on this earth”.
The Pentagon has since acknowledged that it has recorded encounters with UFOs, also known as, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAP).
The U.S. Department of Defense officially released three videos in April 2020 that show some of the UAPs in action. The videos were originally leaked by Tom DeLonge, the former Blink–182 lead singer who co-founded a UFO research organization.
Designated department
The phenomena remain unexplained, despite rampant speculation about visitors from other planets. U.S. officials said they’re being more forthcoming about UAPs because they could be a threat. They also want military members to report potential UFO encounters, rather than ignoring them because of a stigma around the topic.
The Pentagon announced on August 14 that it had launched a UFO task force to “improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs”.
The UFO task force’s goal is to “detect, analyze & catalogue UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security”.
There remains no definitive proof that aliens have visited Earth, and all unidentified aerial phenomena – or UFOs – remain unexplained, as their names say.
