Fleet of Spiral Rod-shaped UFOs caught on satellite - perhaps?

Now, dont get your knickers in a bunch, but I think I may have found a satellite image of a fleet of spiral rod-shaped UFOs. This is not a hoax, but it might be image artifacts. You decide.

I was looking online for 16-bit tiff files and the one which was suggested was an image of iceflows in antarctica(I think). I downloaded it and there are at least 8 of these things in various positions in the photo. I have screen captured 3 sections and to me they do look like these spiral UFOs which people have reported.

However, what is possibly pointing to some kind of image artifact is that they are all pointing in the same direction (UFOs in formation?) and have a very regular outline (but if they were craft of some kind, then they would all be the same - like F16s are)

So, I dont know. What do you think? I will find the original 16-bit image and upload it somewhere so you can download it and look in Photoshop.

The 16-bit original which is 6Mb .tif file is here It was given in a Stackoverflow thread, so I guess it is publicly available.

reply to post by qmantoo


well I need a few things to even bother with this:

Link to the source files
Information as to what they actually are, what they were taken with, etc etc.

Could be artifacts, could be result of images being stitched together.

Could be giant spiral UFOs, but you can't even tell if they are flying from this so the term UFO might not apply at all.
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eta: saw your link taking a peek at the original now


Yeah the site isn't giving me much information on how these images are obtained, I'm guessing satellite but without better details all I can say is weird


I get a quicktime error trying to view the original image, but you can truncate the link and see it's an ice shelf data sheet.

reply to post by qmantoo


The link doesn't work for me for the full picture but I'd say they are probably the result of a problem with the images rather than something in in the air .

Normal images we get on here are not 16-bit TIF files which is why your computers are not showing them correctly. Normally JPG or GIF files are 8-bits per each part of a RGB colour pixel. Like I said in the OP I was looking for a 16-bit image and this one came from a satellite when they were imaging the polar icecaps. Photoshop can open 16-bit TIF images I think and also GIMP too. I have linux and the image viewer opens it up fine.

The 'spirals' appear to be different at the top and bottom as if they are rotating and the photo caught them at different times, but as I said, they could be artifacts. If they are real ufos, then it is an amazing picture.

reply to post by qmantoo


I agree that they seem to be some digital artifacts of some type I notice them in the middle and then in the bottom left portion of the image, there is a characteristic pixel ladder that occurs only in digital formats (pixelized information)

Are those infrared images? if not, I have seen the same artifact as a place indicator, a thick black line which is actually spiral looking close up but with text.[I don't know why the blocking effect on a straight line, you could expect to see that if it were curved.] Cancel that, it is likely spiral looking because the line is a diagonal. Alternatively they might use the marks to place maps for establishing latitude and longitude.

Smurfy -
So the lines are spiral-looking due to the pixels in the image? Because if the pixels were small enough we would see a diagonal line. Yes, that makes sense as I have seen the lines which go to make up circles appear very 'blocky' due to the pixels making up the lines.

Ok, taking this as the explanation, the we should expect to see this in other images too but what are they marking and why diagonal lines, and why no text? We should also expect to see other pixels the same size as the ones making up the 'spiral' when we zoom in on the image, but maybe that is not so in this case? These images appear to be the ones released from the satellite(due to the name of the file - I would have expected the name to have changed if they had been annotated by the university personnel) Why are they not randomly placed on the image, according to where marked features are on the ground? The 'spirals' appear to be at the same heading/tilt but not in any particular formation. Just my thoughts...