From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 10:48:02 -0500
Fwd Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 10:48:02 -0500
Subject: Scientists Show How To Make A UFO


Source: MSNBC.Com

http://www.msnbc.com/news/863997.asp?0cv=CB20&cp1=1#BODY

Scientists Show How To Make A UFO    
SOHO team responds to claims of alien craft with a laugh

By Alan Boyle
MSNBC
 
Jan. 24 - The astronomers in charge of the Solar and 
Heliospheric Observatory issued an unusual response Friday to 
widely reported claims that pictures from the sun-observing 
satellite contained evidence of alien spacecraft: In addition to 
scoffing at the claims, they showed how to turn SOHO imagery 
into UFO snapshots.

THE HOW-TO GUIDE

http://www.ufomag.co.uk/euroseti.htm

came in the wake of claims from a British-based group called
EuroSETI that hundreds of UFO-like images had been gleaned from
NASA satellite imagery. The claims were picked up by newspapers
in Britain and Australia over the past week or two, linking the
photographs to SOHO, a $1 billion U.S.-European satellite that
observes the sun from a vantage point 1 million miles from
Earth.

The Perth Times

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2003_01_17/NewspaperSOHOsmall.jpg

headlined its article 'UFO' on NASA camera', while the Evening
News of Scotland worked the claims into an account that declared
"We're Doomed."

"The images are irrefutable in that they are from official
satellites owned by NASA. They resemble the kind of spacecraft
we used to see in sci-fi films like Star Trek," Graham Birdsall,
editor of UFO magazine, was quoted as saying in the Perth
newspaper.

Last week, MSNBC.com forwarded press reports about the imagery
to Paal Brekke, the European Space Agency's deputy project
scientist for SOHO. In response, Brekke said he was aware of the
claims and thought they were "quite funny."

By Friday, Brekke and his colleagues had put together a more
elaborate response.

"Ever since launch, there's been a number of people who've
projected their fantasies onto the SOHO images, seeing flying
saucers and other esoteric objects," he noted. "Mostly, we're
just amused by the unfounded claims, but in recent days, we've
been receiving so many questions and claims (in news stories)
that we'd like to set the record straight: We've never seen
anything that even suggests that there are UFOs `out there.'
That is, to our (trained) eyes."

Brekke pointed to the new how-to UFO guide on NASA's SOHO Web
site. The cosmic-ray hit shown within the white box, part of a
much larger image of the sun and its surroundings, was enlarged
and processed to produce the UFO-like image seen at the top of
this article.

The SOHO team's technique starts out with a garden-variety image
of the sun from the spacecraft's Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging
Telescope. Such images often include tiny marks made by cosmic
rays hitting the instrument's detector. In the SOHO team's
example, one of those marks is enlarged several times, smoothed
into a saucerlike shape, then filtered to give it a metallic
glint.

The guide said the UFO recipe also could start out with the
speck-sized shapes of planets visible on some SOHO imagery, or
with marks left because of detector defects, software glitches
or space debris.

"It should be noted that we do see objects moving in SOHO
images," the guide said. "Over 500 comets have been discovered
in SOHO images, most by amateurs using LASCO data which have
been downloaded from the Web. That's more comets than from any
other observatory, either from the ground or in space. People
are looking for moving objects in these pictures all the time,
and are highly motivated to find them. None of them have ever
turned out to be anything other than comets."

Over the years, NASA has taken various approaches to dealing
with conspiracy and UFO claims. In a fact sheet:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/facts/HTML/FS-015-HQ.html

the space agency notes that no governmental agencies are
currently investigating claims relating to alien spacecraft or
civilizations. NASA has also disputed repeated claims that the
Apollo moon landings were nothing more than Cold War hoaxes,
although it recently backed away from commissioning a high-
  profile refutation of such claims for fear that the effort
would stir up more controversy than it was worth.

Brekke and his colleagues acknowledged that hard-core UFO
researchers probably wouldn't accept their detailed explanation
for the saucer imagery _ but they hoped the new how-to guide
would "provide some information for the curious who want to
investigate the claims on their own."



Hot Shots from SOHO
How to Make Your Own UFO

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/2003_01_17/

What do you think? Tell Cosmic Log
cosmiclog@msnbc.com

-----

Thanks to GT McCoy for the lead - he wrote:

Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 07:04:21 -0800

Hello, Listerions,

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

http://www.msnbc.com/news/863997.asp?0cv=CB20

NASA Explians it all. Yes. Right.


GT McCoy