Astronaut UFO Photographs Explained
Gemini-11 Mercury 7 Blobs
Related web site: "Prosaic
(non-UFO) Explanation of Borman's 'bogie' Conversation".
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Mercury 7 Blobs
Mercury-7 (MA-7) -- Often wrongly attributed to John Glenn's
MA-6 flight (February 1962), this image (IMAGE:
MA7) is a blow-up from a photograph taken by Scott Carpenter on MA-7
(May 1962). It shows a partially-inflated optical tracking test balloon
tethered outside his window. The sharp-edged blobiness looks weird but
is a standard feature of humongous enlargements of photographic images
of angular objects under the high contrast of bright sunlight in space.
Another excellent illustration of this is found in the next image (IMAGE:
GT5 REP), from the Gemini-5 flight (August 1965), showing what
is actually the small "Radar Evaluation Pod" ("REP")
ejected from the spacecraft. What the REP really looks like is shown here
(IMAGE: REP_ON_EARTH).
In the blobby highly-magnified image from space, the REP and its pole-mounted
transponder and its detached thermal blanket can be recognized only if
the observed object's actual original appearance is already known. Compare
the appearance of the Gemini-5 blobs and the Mercury-7 blobs to see that
they illustrate the same photographic effect. Also see and compare with
the Gemini-11 blobs photos for yet another example. The MA-7 image has
been positively identified by the man who held the camera, astronaut Scott
Carpenter, so any presentation of it as an "unknown" must wilfully ignore
the testimony of the primary witness.
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Gemini-11 Blobs
Gemini-11 -- During an unexpected and very brief close fly-by
of the Proton-3 satellite, astronauts Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon performed
a visual inspection and took three photographs. Two of them provided images
which under severe enlargement are shown here (VIEW: GT-11
BLOBS). They exhibit exactly the same ambiguous "blobbiness" seen in
the Mercury-7 and Gemini-5 images, and for the same prosaic reason. However,
the astronauts' sharp eyesight also allowed them to discern more details
of the passing object's structure, and they reported later it looked just
like later photographs of the Proton-3
satellite on display in Europe (VIEW:
PROTON-3), a stubby cylinder with four skewed odd-shaped solar panels.
This identification was confirmed by calculations at NORAD in Colorado
Springs, where both objects were being tracked on radar. The images can
be presented as "unidentified" only by ignoring the testimony of both on-site
witnesses, who saw it in much greater detail than captured on film.
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GT-11
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