It might not be widely realised but since the 1960s, when NASA astronauts first left Earth and began to boldly go where no one had gone before their cameras managed to capture some rather unexpected sights.
From the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and space shuttle programs, astronauts saw unusual lights and objects, some of which have never been convincingly explained away and remain a mystery to this day. The question is, are these images of known objects that for some reason looked different in the new environment of space, naturally occurring phenomena which no one has seen before, or signs that we are not alone in the universe?
An early example of these strange incidents occurred in June 1965 when astronaut Ed White performed the 1st space-walk by an American as part of the Gemini IV mission. At one point during the flight, the pilot Jim McDivitt spotted something strange in space. Back in 1975, Jim commented;
“At the time that I saw it, I said there was something out in front of me or outside the spacecraft that I couldn’t identify, and I never have been able to identify it, and I don’t think anybody ever will…We were in drifting flight and my partner, Ed White, was asleep. I couldn’t see anything out in front of me except just the black sky. And as it was rotating around, I noticed something out in front that was a white cylindrical shape with a white pole sticking out of one corner of it — it [looked like] a beer can with a smooth pencil sticking out.”
It is impossible to judge distance in space unless you already know the size of the thing you are looking at so Jim had no way to tell how close the object was or its size, but he did have the presence of mind to try and photograph the object;
“I grabbed two cameras and took pictures of it.” He commented. Unfortunately, he was not able to see how the object moved or what it did next as the sun shone through the window obscuring his view.
“As the sun shone on the window, I could no longer see out and the thing just disappeared. They checked NORAD records to see what they had up on radar and there wasn’t anything within very close range of us.”
After McDivitt and White landed in the Atlantic Ocean, the films were flown back to Houston, but the quality was poor. Famous astronaut Story Musgrave, is not convinced Jim McDivitt saw an alien craft;
“I’ve seen what other astronauts think is evidence, and for me, it’s not evidence. And I found no conspiracy in terms of covering up information about extraterrestrial visits. But I feel that [aliens are] everywhere out there and they’re doing interstellar travel.”
Nevertheless Story does think that there is intelligent life in the universe even if it hasn’t dropped by to visit us yet. So could Jim have seen another spacecraft that came from another planet? Who can say, but a number of scientists believe there could be intelligent life on other worlds. Seth Shostak from SETI thinks we are not alone;
“We’re beginning to find planets that are sort of like Earth. All signs and arrows are pointing in the same direction — namely, that there probably is life out there.”
Such life, if it exists, may not be that far from our home, our own galaxy may have millions of planets that are capable of supporting life, although whether they do so is or not another matter. Seth explained the likelihood of life existing outside Earth in the following way;
“The number of planets in the part of the universe we can see is roughly comparable to the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth…The bottom line is very simple: With such enormous amount of cosmic real estate, it seems so improbable that we could be alone.”
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