UFO Enthusiasts: UFO Photo Bomb of Scott Kelly Tweet of Southern India

Summary: UFO enthusiasts are interpreting a large object in Scott Kelly's Nov. 15 tweeted image of southern India as a UFO photo bomb.

alleged UFO photo bomb of Nov. 15, 2015, tweet by Scott Kelly‏ @StationCDRKelly

UFO hunters are enthusing over a large object that appears in a photo of southern India posted to Twitter on Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015, by Commander Scott Kelly aboard the International Space Station.

Kelly’s daily tweets during his pioneer 12-month tour of duty orbiting the Earth include #GoodMorning and #GoodNight greetings framed with spectacular photos taken from the station’s Cupola, a dome-shaped, glass-enclosed, panoramic observatory. UFO enthusiasts are seeing more than darkened skies, a star and the lights of southern India in the astronaut’s #GoodNight tweet. A large, light-colored, structured object makes an obvious yet seemingly mysterious appearance in the photo’s upper right.

In the tweet’s aftermath, the worldwide community of UFO enthusiasts is buzzing over a possible alien presence. In a posting on Nov. 18 to his website, UFO Sightings Daily, ufologist Scott C. Waring describes the object that is photo bombing Commander Kelly’s image of nighttime southern India as “a cigar shaped glowing UFO with a metallic body in it. The UFO is about 25 meters long and 150-200 meters away.”

Apart from an alien spacecraft, other explanations for the strange object include space debris or some kind of reflection on the station’s window. Space debris consists of both man-made and natural objects.

Natural objects are meteoroids. Man-made objects encompass such “space junk” as fragmentation and mission-related debris, abandoned launch vehicle stages and nonfunctional spacecraft.

More than 20,000 pieces of debris are sized larger than a softball and are traveling at damaging speeds, up to 17,500 miles per hour (28,163.52 kilometers per hour). About 500,000 pieces are marble-sized or larger. Millions more pieces are too small to be tracked.

On Thursday, Nov. 12, the day before Commander Kelly’s buzzing tweet, NASA administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. discussed the problem of space debris in a presentation, “The Path to Mars,” at the Council on Foreign Relations, a United States nonprofit think tank headquartered in New York City.

In response to an audience question about space debris buildup from Dr. Leah Pedersen Thomas of VitalPet, Administrator Bolden explained: “Not a lot of countries are putting money into debris removal development, and more of us need to. We are among those that’s not putting a lot of money into debris removal. We work a lot on what we call debris mitigation, making rules that say when you put something in space it has to have enough fuel to, when its mission is over, you can either put it into a parking orbit where it won’t come back for a hundred years, or you can safely de-orbit it into the ocean. But that’s not the answer. The answer’s going to be debris removal, and we’ve got to figure out how to do that. And we are not doing sufficient work on it right now.”

Thus far, neither NASA nor Commander Kelly has commented on the possible photo bomb.

Offering his own demystification, Scott Waring agrees with the buzz of a UFO photo bomb of Scott Kelly tweet: “It looks like Scott was trying to hint at the existence of aliens. Message received Scott, and thanks.”

LEO (low Earth orbit) is region of space within 2,000 kilometers (1,242.74 miles) of Earth's surface and is the most concentrated area for orbital debris: NASA Orbital Debris Program Office, Public Domain, via NASA/Johnson Space Center

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

alleged UFO photo bomb (upper right) of tweet by Scott Kelly@StationCDRKelly Nov. 15, 2015, @ https://twitter.com/StationCDRKelly

space debris: NASA Orbital Debris Program Office, Public Domain, via NASA/Johnson Space Center @ http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/photogallery/beehives.html#leo

For further information:

"Astronaut Scott Kelly's 'UFO' photo generates extraterrestrial buzz." Fox News > Science Home > UFOs. Nov. 21, 2015.
Available @ http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/11/21/astronaut-scott-kellys-ufo-photo-generates-extraterrestrial-buzz.html

Garcia, Mark. "Space Debris and Human Spacecraft."NASA. Sept. 26, 2013.
Available @ http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html

"The Path to Mars: A Conversation With Charles F. Bolden Jr." Council on Foreign Relations > Events. Nov. 12, 2015.
Available @ http://www.cfr.org/space/path-mars/p37238

Scott Kelly‏ @StationCDRKelly. "Day 233. Once upon a #star over Southern India. #GoodNight from @space_station! #YearInSpace." Twitter. Nov. 15, 2015.
Available @ https://twitter.com/StationCDRKelly/status/666042034633883649

Waring, Scott. "Astronaut Scott Kelly Tweets Photo Of UFO From ISS, Nov 15, 2015, Video, UFO Sighting News." UFO Sightings Daily. Nov. 18, 2015.
Available @ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/2015/11/astronaut-scott-kelly-tweets-photo-of.html