An unidentified object was captured on live streaming video from the International Space Station earlier this month before NASA’s video feed appeared to abruptly cut off — sparking conspiracy theories about what happened.
In the July 9 footage uploaded to YouTube, the object enters the frame above the Earth’s atmosphere.
“This could well be a meteor or the like,” the YouTube user who uploaded the footage explains. “What made it interesting was the camera cut off when the UFO seemed to stop.”
It didn’t take long for UFO enthusiasts to pounce.
The clip, which has been viewed more than 4 000 000, times, was picked up by such earthly news outlets as the Daily Mail, the Huffington Post and Fox News.
@NASA Shuts Down Live International Space Station Feed As ‘Mysterious UFO Enters Earth’s Atmosphere’
Fox Nation (@foxnation) July 13, 2016
SHOCK ALIEN CLAIM: ‘NASA cuts the ISS live feed moments after UFO appears,’” blared the headline in the U.K. Express.
Others suggested that the object may have been the Chinese space cargo Tiangong-1, which some astronomers fear “could secretly be hurtling towards Earth.”
“Did NASA shut down the ISS live feed for sinister reasons?” London’s Mirror newspaper asked.
Nonsense, says NASA
“We have never seen UFOs in the popular sense,” a NASA spokesperson told Popular Mechanics. “The feed in question is the High Definition Earth Viewing experiment. Anytime the ISS has a signal, that feed is sending down video.”
And anytime the ISS loses that signal, the stream goes dark.
“The feed is not switched manually,” the NASA spokesperson added. “It’s all done automatically. There’s nobody at a control board. We used a space-based data relay network. It gives us a very good coverage area, but you do lose signal occasionally — anywhere from a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes. It varies from day to day.”
But that hasn’t stopped UFO hunters from accusing NASA of covering up evidence of alien life on the ISS live stream. In fact, such accusations happen pretty frequently.
