An overview of the achievements of astronautics in 2016 would be incomplete without the conspiracy theories that have always accompanied NASA's space programs. People in foil hats are still enthusiastically arguing in which desert NASA filmed the film about the landing on the moon and at which specific secret base the remains of aliens are stored. Some are sure that the reptilians have already infiltrated the government, and that Elon Musk himself was born on a Martian colony - and now wants to return to his homeland.
In 2016, ufologists managed to expose several new secrets and insidious secrets of NASA. This is easy to do, because NASA has long posted all the scientific data and photographs taken by spacecraft on the Internet.
Ars Technica has fun annually by running an Internet search for the phrase [“NASA hiding”]. The search now returns 57,100 documents.
Ufologists have known about the existence of life in space for a long time. These rumors were confirmed back in 2014, when Russian scientists discovered traces of marine plankton on the windows outside the International Space Station. This unique discovery was announced by the ISS Russian Segment Flight Director Vladimir Solovyov.
The simplest microorganisms are, of course, not the only creatures in near-earth space. In one of the videos from the ISS last year, many noticed a mysterious pink object hanging next to the station.
Scientists tried to pass this object off as some kind of glare - a reflection of something inside the station.
But this is not the only photograph from the ISS with mysterious objects in the frame. For example, a long, cigar-shaped object was captured during the ISS survey of South India in November 2015. It can be clearly seen in the upper right corner of the photo.
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The information instantly spread across social networks, received thousands of retweets and likes. The UFO video has received almost a million views. Scientists again found an extraneous explanation for the phenomenon. They said it was supposedly part of the ISS's design.
This year, the NASA administration also had to work hard to explain the mysterious objects that are periodically noticed in photographs.
Conspiracy theorists are absolutely sure that NASA is editing the video stream from the ISS. These rumors intensified especially in July 2016, when NASA suddenly turned off live video from the station, just as an unidentified flying object came into view of the camera.
The object began to slowly descend to Earth when the broadcast was suddenly interrupted due to technical problems. A NASA spokesman said in an official comment that the broadcast was not interrupted on purpose, and the cameras on board the ISS are working in automatic mode. It's just that the station periodically leaves the reception area of satellites of the object tracking and data transfer system (TDRSS), which receive a video stream from cameras.
One of the vigilant users under the nickname Streetcap1 recorded a video stream right before the broadcast was interrupted - and uploaded it to YouTube. Over the past months, the video has been watched about 4 million times. Most users probably believe in the conspiracy theory because the number of likes is seven times the number of dislikes.
It is not known how the landing of a strange object on Earth is connected with a massive hole right at the North Pole of our planet, which allegedly opened a couple of months before. In May 2016, a concerned user of secureteam10 informed humanity about the portal.
To date, the 13-minute video has received 2.3 million views. The author has professionally whipped up the situation by compiling dozens of old satellite photos that prove NASA is "caught red-handed trying to hide the truth."
In the film, there is a fragment of a NASA video recording during a flight over Antarctica, when, right during the approach to the portal, an astronaut suddenly closes the camera lens. Very mysterious.
It is strange that the filmmakers show old photographs, while there are a large number of actual photographs of the poles in much better quality. For some reason, no hole is visible in the photographs of the North Pole.
And the scientific station at the South Pole has not yet been sucked anywhere.
By the way, the aforementioned author of secureteam10 has long specialized in exposing NASA conspiracies. In another video, he proves that NASA is hiding an object in photographs of the Sun taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft.
This cubic object, which "sucks energy from the Sun", NASA claims as "pixel glitches."
According to ufologists, the government's explanation does not stand up to criticism, because the cubic object was photographed by two different cameras at different times, and the cube remained in the same place, "continuing to suck energy out of our star."
If you also noticed strange objects in photos of Mars, the Sun and from near-earth orbit, let us know in the comments.
Anatoly Alizar