Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

[SkeptInq@aol.com]

 Skeptical Inquirer Electronic Digest, Feb. 22, 2000

 Visit the CSICOP and Skeptical Inquirer Magazine website at
http://www.csicop.org. Receiving over 200,000 hits per year, the CSICOP site
was rated one of the top ten science sites by HOMEPC magazine.

 In this week's SI DIGEST:
 --NASA Consultant James Oberg on the "Space Shuttle UFO Videos"
 --Skeptical Inquirer Classic Articles: 1995 Skeptic Delegation to China

 NASA CONSULTANT JAMES OBERG ON THE "SPACE SHUTTLE UFO VIDEOS"

 Videotapes from space shuttle missions have persuaded some to claim that
NASA astronauts have encountered alien visitors. On the space shuttle mission
STS-48 in September 1991, a TV onboard Discovery spotted moving white dots
suddenly changing direction when a flash of light appeared. Although nearby
debris frequently appears on shuttle videos, the combination of flares,
streaks and changing directions grabbed imaginations.

 James Oberg, a 22-year veteran of NASA's Mission Control in Houston,
contributes the following commentary to SI DIGEST on the alleged shuttle
videos. He is a space consultant for ABC News and a space writer for United
Press International.

 For more information on the topic, also read his commentary on the ABC news
web site at
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/ufo990217.html or visit
Oberg's web site at http://www.jamesoberg.com .

 From Oberg:

 "From hints I've gotten from people involved, these "new" videos allegedly
show miles-wide UFOs passing behind the deployed tether on shuttle mission
STS-75 (February 1996), and a night-time fly-past of a camera on STS-96 (May
1999).

 It's easy to speculate wildly about such apparitions as long as you
deliberately keep yourself and your audience in ignorance of the most basic
facts about space shuttle missions. At all costs, avoid asking the actual
witnesses -- the astronauts and the specialists in Mission Control -- what
they saw or thought about such events. Make smart-sounding 'guesses' about
the situation on the shuttle, but never ever find out which cameras were
involved, what direction the shuttle was pointed, what the lighting
conditions were (natural and artificial), and so forth.

 Then you'll be safe to theorize and to make dark allegations of evil
coverups.

 Authentic investigations of these kinds of apparitions -- most notoriously
from STS-48 in 1991 and STS-80 in 1996, but also on STS-63 in 1995 and on
other flights -- shows a striking and highly suggestive pattern. The white
dots appear when the shuttle moves into sunlight, or slightly afterwards as
the small nearby objects drift out of the shuttle's own shadow. They move in
straight lines except when shuttle thrusters fire, as documented by telemetry
and synchronized with time-tagged tapes of the motion, or when the shuttle
camera is pan/tilting, or when they drift near the edge of the wide-angle
camera lenses. In other words, the dots appear to act exactly like small
spaceship-derived debris is expected to act, and has been seen to act for
nearly forty years.

 Sometimes the B&W cameras aren't properly focused, and the dots -- along
with background stars -- look like horizontal smears, or even -- if very
bright -- as donuts with the bright centers grayed-out (the same camera
behavior can be seen in lightning bursts and when passing over bright
cities). Fast-moving dots -- and even background stars, when the camera is
pan/tilting rapidly -- leave streaks on the image due to latency on the
optical sensors. Flakes of ice which slowly tumble will flash regularly.

 Thirty years ago, NASA commissioned a study to catalog and identify dots in
out-the-window views from Apollo, to determine if they were indications of
hazards to the spacecraft (such as leaks from jets, or lost hardware).
Astronauts joked about these "moon pigeons", but they turned out to be
spacecraft-derived debris, either ice or pyrotechnic fragments or flaking
insulation. The shuttle has even more sources of 'shuttle dandruff' and under
the proper lighting conditions, such dots can often be seen all around the
spacecraft.

 None of these dots has said "hello", yet, nor taken hostile or evasive
action, despite the fertile imaginations -- deliberately unbounded by hard
realities -- of proponents of extraordinariness for such entirely prosaic
space phenomena.

 The STS-96 fly-past, for example, looks like a nearby (and hence
out-of-focus) piece of shuttle payload bay debris, illuminated by the lights
of the shuttle as it drifts in front of one of the cameras. The STS-75 video
also appears to show very nearby objects passing in front of the tether far
behind them -- the pixel resolution is nowhere near good enough to justify
concluding the objects can be seen passing BEHIND the tether.


 SI CLASSIC ARTICLES: 1995 SKEPTIC DELEGATION TO CHINA

 In a friendly debate over alternative medicine with fellow graduate students
here at Cornell, I turned to two past articles from Skeptical Inquirer
archived in full text at http://www.csicop.org.  They are recommended reading
for the curious about Chinese medicine, and are again very timely with the
recent events in China involving Qi Gong practitioners.  Besides being
available on the web, the articles can be ordered by calling 1800-634-1610.

 --Matt

 _"Traditional Medicine and Pseudoscience in China: A Report of the Second
CSICOP Delegation (Part 1 and 2)," Skeptical Inquirer, July/Aug. & Sept./Oct.
1997.

 Go to http://www.csicop.org/si/9607/china.html

 In this, the first of a two-part report on a 1995 CSICOP delegation to
China, the authors discuss the historical rationale for Traditional Chinese
Medicine (TCM), its involvement with the questionable Qigong movement, and
the growing importation to the West of these practices by Western
practitioners of "alternative medicine."

 They present their observations of how TCM is practiced at the major TCM
facility in Beijing and describe their visit to China's preeminent
neurophysiology lab studying the neurochemical underpinnings of acupuncture
effects.

 Barry L. Beyerstein, Professor of Psychology, Simon Frasier University, CA

 Wallace Sampson, Professor of Clinical Medicine, Stanford University, USA
(now retired).

 In the second of a two-part report of a recent CSICOP delegation to the
People's Republic of China, the authors describe their participation in a
symposium on pseudoscience in China, held in Beijing, and their further
interactions with practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Shanghai.
Go to http://www.csicop.org/si/9609/china.html
 ________________________

 SI Electronic Digest is the biweekly e-mail news update of the Committee for
the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP.)

 Visit http://www.csicop.org/.

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