Hello everyone. This simple presentation gives a closer look at a three different segments of footage recorded during Shuttle Mission STS-80, flown in November / December of 1996. Specifically, these three segments were filmed during the deployment of the WSF -- “Wake Shield Facility” Satellite during that mission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Shield_Facility

The WSF satellite is the large, free-drifting, disc-shaped object that is visible in the Field-Of-View in all three segments of footage. In segment #1, the WSF is partially visible at the very top of the FOV, and in segments 2 & 3 it is fully visible near the center at standoff distance.

For all three segments, I show the raw footage (at 4x/16x playback speed), followed by several enhancements of each scene in an effort to better highlight the movement profile of the unidentified objects as they traverse across the camera’s field-of-view. The enhancements of Segment #1 were also stabilized in order to compensate for the movement of the camera system when it was remotely panned during filming. That scene was stabilized using the shuttle RMS (Remote Manipulator System) as the known stable object in frame.

With the flightpath enhancements, rather than merely showing a basic continuous flightpath trace for each object from start to finish, I instead elected to employ a more dynamic display technique here that allows for better recognition of not only the individual flightpaths for each object, but it also provides a real-time visual reference of the apparent velocity of each object at any given time. The length of the flightpath tail you see trailing behind each object in the animated flightpath enhancements is directly proportional to that object’s speed -- so simply put, the faster the object is moving across the camera’s FOV, the longer the flightpath tracking tail behind it will be. If the object experiences an apparent change in velocity as it is moving around the scene, then the length of the flightpath tracking tail will adjust ‘on the fly’ to account for it. This display method allows for better visual recognition of any delta-v changes the objects experience. As always, the flightpath tracking enhancements of the scenes shown here were all built from the raw footage.

Please keep in mind, the fact is that there is simply no way for anyone to identify any of the objects seen in these three segments (aside from the WSF satellite of course), so therefore, by definition, those objects are classified as being “unidentified”.

Of course, the term “UFO” does not necessarily mean “Alien Spacecraft”. These objects can be accurately referred to as being “UFOs” because that is exactly what they are. They are anomalous, unknown objects clearly flying free in space that cannot be identified as being any form of known man-made structure or known celestial object. We do not know what they are, how they got there, where they came from, where they are going, or what they are doing there. By definition, that makes them “UFOs”.

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