False sightings

Hi everyone! I was looking for something to talk about on today’s post when I found a quite interesting article from the NASA about a supposedly UFO that was videotaped by the camera on the Apollo 16 which turns out it was not really one. When the Apollo 16 was returning from the moon on April 27, 1972; the astronauts John Young, Thomas Mattingly and Charles Duke captured about four seconds of video footage of an object that seemed to look like a spacecraft from another world (Nasa.gov).

Here is a picture of what the camera captured and was thought could be an UFO:

The object was described as <a saucer-shaped object with a dome on top>. The pictures were captured with a 16mm motion picture camera shooting 12 frames per second from a command/service module window. The object appears momentarily near the moon and as the camera pans, it moves out of the field of view before it reappears as the camera pans back. In total, it appeared in around 50 frames (Nasa.gov).

Some specialists recently studied the footage and they found out that the crew of the Apollo 16 never thought of having seen anything special in the film at the moment when it was recorded and besides this, scientists analyzed a high quality format of the footage and arranged the frames where this object appeared in chronological order for them to make the investigation as accurate as possible (UFOEvidence.org). The combinations they made with the footage showed them more clearly a "linear feature" attached to one side of the object. They also looked at archived images from other Apollo missions and they found out that in the end, there was strong evidence that suggested that the pictures taken by the Apollo 16 were not true since the spacecraft had a structure called EVA a spacewalk floodlight/boom which had a similar structure to the one of the object that appears in the pictures (Nasa.gov).

I think this discovery is quite interesting because, thanks to those studies made to the footage on Apollo 16, it was determined that the supposedly UFO was not a real one besides it is good for us to break with the habit of believing at first sight everything we see and/or everything people tell us. There have been more false sightings of UFOs around the world and most of those false sightings have been identified and removed from the media. However, can we be sure that the sightings we believe are true are for sure real?Or for example, that our own believes on UFOs are real? How can we be sure that what we identify as an UFO is really one and not a sight mistake? I hope you liked the post and feel free to comment on the section below. See you next week.

Works Cited

Latest UFO sightings. 20 September 2011. 21 September 2011 <http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/>.

UFO Evidence. 2011. 21 September 2011 <http://www.ufoevidence.org/>.