The mysterious object, just to the right of Mercury
A Youtube user called siniXster has posted a video of a tract of space near Mercury. In it, a solar flare (or coronal mass ejection – CME) apparently illuminates an object that could not be seen before. In remarkably unsurprised sounding tones, given that he may have just spotted something that could change the course of science for, well, ever, siniXster says “this is just insane,” and exhorts us to look at a blank space – “obviously it’s cloaked”, he says, then “you can see it’s not there.” An oblong shape appears after the sunlight hits it – “it’s obviously a spaceship. There’s absolutely no explanation for that other than it’s some sort of ship.” The sequence, reported The Daily Mail, was taken by the Heliospheric Imager-1 telescope and was on the US Nacy’s SECCHI website. So should we be preparing for a mass invasion? Or breaking out the champagne to greet our new space-friends?
“As long as mankind has gazed into the vast night sky above, he has wondered: hey, is that a giant alien death star ship, parked over by Mercury?” asked Hamilton Nolan on Gawker.
“‘It’s cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it’s cloaked,’ said siniXster on the video.
Uh. It’s just what happens when you look at space. However, scientists have explained away the image as being Mercury itself, from the day before. Engineer Nathan Rich, of the United States Naval Research Laboratory, said, quoted on The Daily Mail, “‘When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image.” So there you go.
“No way could it be an alien spaceship the size of Mercury because Mercury is the size of our moon and we would know about it,” said Astonomer Dr Heather Couper, quoted on The Daily Mail.
No! No! It’s aliens! No, really it is! There’s no pleasing some people, however, and Weekly World News was having none of those pesky scientists’ claims. Obviously, the spaceship is from the Planet Gootan – the UN Panel of Extraterrestrials, no less, says so. Three ships from Gootan have landed on earth already. Dr Susan Begley, of that esteemed organisation, said that this ship “will land on Earth sometime in late January,” although quite how a spaceship as big as the moon is going to land on Earth is beyond Periscope‘s ken. Alleging that the Gootans had bases on Mercury, Begley said “The Gootans are strong and powerful beings. This does not surprise me.”
Er. No, really, it’s not. “Sadly for siniXster, conspiracy theorists, ufologists and Star Trek buffs, there’s no Klingons off Mercury’s starboard bow,” said Iain O’Neill on Discovery.com. The experts at SECCHI have come up with a “crystal clear” explanation. So it’s not a UFO at all, but simply something that happens when “tracking CMEs travel through interplanetary space in real-time.” It’s just “a nuisance factor caused by a computer program trying to deliver images quickly.” In order to analyze images properly – and to check “any claims of cloaked Klingon Birds of Prey” – you need to “wait until several days of data is assembled and noise effectively removed.” It was Mercury all along. Which, despite its obvious truth, makes Periscope just the tiniest bit sad.