This former NASA engineer has debunked almost every UFO sighting on the internet

You’ve probably heard a lot of stories about people seeing UFOs. Conspiracy theorists have a field day when an astronaut on the ISS takes a picture of a fireball shooting across the sky of Earth. The internet loves a good alien conspiracy, whether it’s about clouds that look like spaceships or rogue meteors.

But former NASA engineer James Oberg has made it his mission to find all the sightings and stories and use science to politely disprove them.

The bottom line? Oberg says that most of your “crazy UFO sightings” are just “space dandruff,” or your brain’s mistaken idea of what space travel looks like.

Atlas Obscura’s Cara Giaimo says that after working at NASA mission control in the late 1990s, Oberg became a space journalist and historian. He didn’t start to pay attention to UFO sightings until a few years ago.

He doesn’t want to just trash true believers, which he calls “stomping on dormice.” Instead, he wants to figure out what’s going on in these images and videos and why people are reacting so strongly to them.

What was his idea? Our brains get confused when things change because our senses are used to focusing on things that move slowly, as well as certain light and air conditions.

Oberg told Giaimo, “Our sensory system is working perfectly for how things are on Earth.” “But we are still a small society. Moving out of our neighborhood has made it hard to see.”

Some of the most common sightings he has to explain away involve NASA astronauts who say they saw UFOS but were told to keep quiet. Oberg says this is because we watch too much science fiction and don’t really know what space looks like.

“I’ve done enough real spaceflight to know that what’s shown in many videos is nothing out of the ordinary, just everyday things happening in out-of-this-world places,” Oberg writes on his site.

Here are some of the most common reports you might have seen on the Internet, along with Oberg’s explanation of what’s really going on:

What happened? Space dandruff is made up of things like ice flakes, paint chips, and bits of insulation that have fallen off spacecraft during flight. On his website, Oberg says that they are different from space junk because they don’t really hurt spacecraft.

Even though these bits of dandruff are pretty common, they look strange to us because we’re not used to how they look when they fall from the space station as it moves through space.

It’s the same reason why people see so many UFOs in the videos from the old space shuttle missions that NASA took.

People usually freak out in these videos because the spots seem to move around or suddenly appear and disappear. Which is pretty creepy if you’re sitting at your computer on Earth, but not so strange if you’re on a space shuttle going 28,000 km/h (17,500 mph) because nothing will stay in your line of sight for very long.

And if the spacecraft is in the right place in relation to the Sun, it can also cast its shadow on these objects to make them disappear and reappear. This is called “twilight shadowing.”

People in southern California were scared when they saw a bright white light shoot across the night sky at the end of 2015.

But it became clear pretty quickly after the accident that it was caused by the US Navy testing a missile that wasn’t armed. The rocket thruster shot out a plume of particles that made the light trail look strange.

So why did everyone else think it was creepy? Because here on Earth, we’re used to seeing thin trails of smoke or thin trails of vapour left by planes. But most of us haven’t seen anything this big and sharp in a long time, if ever.

Oberg told Atlas Obscura, “There were thousands of people who were absolutely processing their visual stimuli correctly whether [the plume] was a mile away or 10 miles away.” “But it was 300 miles (482 km) away, in space, and brightly lit, which they had never thought of because this is not something most people see or do.

All of this doesn’t mean that we should stop telling people about UFOs or think that everything is “normal.”

Oberg told The Huffington Post in 2013 that it was important to keep looking for strange things on space videos and report them quickly.

The reason is that there is always a real chance that it is a real anomaly, like a problem with the spacecraft or another threat, whether it was expected or not. In the past, missions have failed because someone missed a clue that was right outside the window.