Possible UFO during NASA Dawn Liftoff!

I saw it too but just assumed it was a star.

Why do these and similar threads always start with 'Possible'?
I mean its possible it could be one of my wifes Yorkshire puddings, but highly improbable.

reply to post by Chorlton


well i decided to start with 'possible' because neither i nor someone else can clearly say up to now whether it is a UFO or not. of course you're right when you say it could be everything and is unlikely a UFO. but keep in mind that this is no airplane / bird / balloon and probably also not venus. so maybe you have a more plausible explanation?

reply to post by EBE154


Why do you say that this is not an airplane?

Is there anything that you can see that rules out that possibility?

Originally posted by Osyris
If you watch the way it moves it looks to be a feather illuminated by the sun floating by the land based camera. Thats my 2 cents anyways.

That would have to be a very big feather!

reply to post by ArMaP


i can 'see' that this object is stationary and does not move as soon as it comes into view. try a freeze frame every 0.1x seconds and you will see that the position of the object does not change even though the camera moves over it very fast. another aspect is of course that no airplane of this size would be allowed to come only near the rocket / into this prohibited airspace. there are special areas where commercial air traffic is not allowed and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is one of them!

[edit on 29-9-2007 by EBE154]

reply to post by EBE154


Looks like a bright star or planet to me...

Originally posted by Lost_Mind
Man, I really hate to say this but Venus was straight up almost 90 deg @ 7:30 am during the launch. Commence rock throwing, let me go put on my tinfoil suit first..... the moon set about 6:45.

Go to Sky and Telescope, register, and you will be able use the interactive chart and it does post data by zippy code.

[edit on 28-9-2007 by Lost_Mind]

Did everyone miss this post? I believe Lost_Mind nailed it.
I hate to say it as much as him, but I'm pretty sure that's Venus.

Venus reaches its maximum brightness shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset, for which reason it is often called the Morning Star or the Evening Star.

wiki

[edit on 9/29/07 by aecreate]

I'd have to agree that it's Venus. I've been watching it every morning at work for a couple of weeks now since it fooled me into thinking it was an Aircraft approaching a near be airport. It was so bright I assumed if was a Landing light and stood there for about 5 minutes before I realized it wasn't. (I felt really stupid, I'm just glad I was alone) Anyway, when I got home I checked it out to see if it was Venus and found that it was. I swear, I'd never seen it as bright as it was that day, and what added to my confusion was that I saw another bright light below and to the left that "was" an aircraft landing at XNA. Since then, I've noticed it at various intensity and watch it well into the morning with the sun coming up. But to be sure, you'd have to know the rockets course and the camera angle to confirm it as Venus for sure.

reply to post by aecreate


I never thought that it could be Venus, but now I have changed my mind and I also think that this was not an airplane.

I reached this conclusion because, after joining the 29 frames where the "UFO" is visible I could see that it was not going in a perfectly straight path, as an airplane would do in the 1.4 seconds it is visible.

I used the tip of the rocket as the reference to join the images, but I may have failed to align them exactly as I should. Even if I did not aligned them correctly, I don't think that the slight change of direction could be attributed to that.

And I still do not know what it was.

PS: the fact that the "UFO" appears to move more from the first frame to the second than from the second to the third and so on may be related to the encoding used on the video.

Just posting this to bolster the Venus theory, if possible. I'm not absolutely sure myself as of yet but so far in my head Venus makes more sense than anything else, especially after seeing the Sky & Telescope info. This is a shot of Venus in mid afternoon and its not a long exposure photo, 1/250 sec.

I cant post an image of the screen shot from Sky & Telescope here, the image would be too inferior or small to make sense in a post, so if ya wanna see it do the leg work and register with Sky & Telescope and plug in the 32899 zip for KSC and mod the date to reflect the launch time and voila! Venus is 80 to 90 deg. up.

Maybe someone knows enough (I certainly dont) about nav to triangulate the launch trajectory in relation Venus' position to see if the camera could of caught it in its pan. One would have to have a fairly good idea of where the camera was positioned though....might be impossible the more I think about it, or at least very difficult to do.

After thinking more about it, seeing the video some more and registering on Sky & Telescope and seeing the Interactive Sky Chart, this is what I think at the moment.

1 - It could be Venus. As I thought, the rockets are launched toward the East, and at the time the Sun was rising from the East with Venus 47º above it.

2 - That video does not show the angle that the camera was doing to film the rocket. Was it around 47º? Was it more? Was it less? Considering that the rocket goes up but also to East, I think it is possible that the camera was at more or less 45º up, so the "UFO" can really be Venus.

So, until we find more information about it, I think that this may be Venus, at least for now.

It was probably a Bird.

You can see birds on just about every launch because to date NASA has never figured out how to get them out of the immediate area.

reply to post by lost_shaman


I thought about that too, but the fact that they usually appear in groups made me give less weight to that option.

After seeing the 29 frames and not noticing a change of shape of the "UFO" that would reflect the flapping of the wings of a bird (and a bird at that time of day would need to flap its wings, it could use any hot air currents) made me keep that option only as a less probable one.

Originally posted by ArMaP
reply to post by lost_shaman

 

I thought about that too, but the fact that they usually appear in groups made me give less weight to that option.

But the camera was zooming in on the rocket. There could have been a whole group of birds and we only saw the one that came into the field of view.

Originally posted by ArMaP
After seeing the 29 frames and not noticing a change of shape of the "UFO" that would reflect the flapping of the wings of a bird (and a bird at that time of day would need to flap its wings, it could use any hot air currents) made me keep that option only as a less probable one.

The Vultures at the Cape ride thermals quite early in the morning.

Just after the object passes (or not) The rocket is 3 miles out.....Just wanted to add that.

Originally posted by lost_shaman
But the camera was zooming in on the rocket. There could have been a whole group of birds and we only saw the one that came into the field of view.

Yes, and that is one of the reasons I still have the "bird version" on my list of possible explanations.

The Vultures at the Cape ride thermals quite early in the morning.

Even just at Sun-rise, as was the case?

I have never seen a vulture (there are very few vultures in Portugal, at least the ones that fly ), and the only birds I have seen flying high, even before the Sun-rise are seagulls, a completely different type of bird, so I do not have any information about it.

But as I said, they are still a possible explanation.

It was a bird. You can see the way it bank to the right and you can make out its wings. Looks like a seagull or some kind of tern.

If you guys say that NASA is covering everything up, (The moon, the STS downfeeds, everything) then why would they let this footage be viewed by the public.

This makes zero sense for NASA if they were into this whole coverup.

There was no UFO people. Nothing to see here folks. AGAIN. Move on. No conspiracy, no cover up. No Bilderbergers. No MJ12. Just your everyday garden variety ho-humm bird.




[edit on 30-9-2007 by omnicron]