If you have eye and use the internet, you've probably seen more than your fair share of stories about UFO sightings. Whether its strange clouds that look like spaceships, ominous looking blurs filmed from the global Space Station, or rogue meteors, the world wide web loves a good alien conspiracy.
But former NASA engineer James Oberg has taken it upon himself to trawl through all the sightings and stories out there and politely debunk them, using science.
But former NASA engineer James Oberg has taken it upon himself to trawl through all the sightings and stories out there and politely debunk them, using science.
The conclusion? Most of your "insane UFO sightings" are little more than 'space dandruff', or your brain misunderstanding of what space travel actually looks like, says Oberg.
As Cara Giaimo from Atlas Obscura reports, after working at NASA mission control in the late '90s, Oberg went on to become a space journalist and historian. It wasn't until a a small number of years ago that he started to take UFO sightings seriously.
His goal isn't to simply crap all over true believers - he calls that "stomping on dormice" - instead he's interested in teasing out exactly what's going on in these images and videos, and trying to figure out why people are reacting so strongly to them.
His hypothesis? Our human senses our so used to focussing on relatively slow-moving objects, as well as certain light and atmosphere conditions, that when things change, our brains get confused.
"Our sensory system is functioning absolutely perfectly for Earth conditions," Oberg told Giaimo. "But we're still a local civilisation. Moving beyond our neighbourhood has been visually confusing."
Some of the most common sighting he has to debunk are to do with NASA astronauts reportedly seeing UFOS and being forced to remain silent, which Oberg says is a result of us watching too much sci-fi and not really understanding what space really looks like.
"I've had enough experience with real spaceflight to realise that what’s being seen in many videos is nothing beyond the 'norm' from fully mundane phenomena occurring in unearthly settings," Oberg writes over on his site.
Here are some of the more general reports you might have seen on the interwebs, and Oberg's explanation of what's really going on:
The real story? Space dandruff, which are things that have shed off space vehicles during flight, like ice flakes, paint chips, or fragments of insulation. They're different to space junk, because they don't pose a real threat to spacecraft, Oberg explains on his site.
These flecks of dandruff are pretty common, but the reason they look so weird to us is that we're not used to the way these objects look when they fall while the space station is travelling through space.
It's the same cause why people see so many UFOs in the footage filmed by the cameras attached to NASA's old space shuttle missions.
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