A Retrospective on “Huge UFOs Near the Sun” by Ufonalyzer 1/2011

A Retrospective on “Huge UFOs Near the Sun”
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Last January, 2010, there were many stories about the huge UFOs near the sun that appeared in some of NASA’s sun images. (For reasons that will be explained later, I am going to name these hypothetical UFOs “Vulcan UFOs”.) Recall that NASA’s response at the time was that these images were an image processing software artifact of some sort and that they really weren’t physically there. NASA’s press release on the matter was poorly written and used terms that only a software writer for image processing might understand. It may have been designed to technologically overwhelm the public to a) make it sound believable and b) humble the public into silence. It was an amateurish attempt at damage control which may have been the truth, but the event deserved a better response than NASA gave it. It did not explain why these spheres surrounding the sun looked perfectly round with highlights. One would have expected the software error that caused these planet sized UFOs to appear and look so perfect would have resulted in a smudge or scribble or some other visual form other than a perfect sphere that was consistent with everything else that was in the image, including the sun. Their response was very dissatisfying and dismissive and did not put the “nail in the coffin” on this event.*

Since the time when “Huge UFOs Near the Sun” was written in January, 2010, more reports have come in which are available on YouTube about the same thing. Most of these reports deal with the January, 2010, news story, but a few of the reports claim that these large UFO sightings are still occurring. The short clip at http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/behemoth.htm, allegedly filmed 10 years before the huge UFO story, shows an image that looks the same thing that was shown in the January 2010 video. So maybe these are real objects and NASA is contributing to the UFO coverup. {Digression: Does it bother you that many UFO videos, stories, and photos are not date stamped and are about old events that are being recycled and put “back on the market” as if they were new? Sometimes it’s hard to tell what is new and what is not.}

The rest of this writeup will discuss these huge UFO images in light of historical information for images that have been seen transiting the sun.

Morris Jessup theorized in his book, “The Case for the UFOs” c1955, that one time sun transiting bodies are really very large UFOs near the earth. These were mistaken by astronomers who reported them as being near the sun, but in reality they are huge UFOs most likely in the upper reaches of our atmosphere. This explains why only one astronomer sees them and are not seen by any of the other astronomers who regularly observe the sun (quantity unknown). This sounds like a pretty good explanation, but there might be other explanations as well.

The book, “Wonders in the Sky” c2009 by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck, is a compilation of 500 ancient celestial sightings ranging from 1460 b.c.e. to 1880 c.e. The 500, by the way, have been filtered by the authors from numerous large bodies of sightings as being the most likely to be true and the most representative of having analyzable merit. About 80% of the data that they analyzed was not used/rejected for inclusion into their book. One frequent category of sightings in this book are transits of the sun by unknown objects. These were addressed by Morris Jesseup’s book, “The Case for the UFO” mentioned previously. In fact, their frequency in history was one of Jessup’s motivations in writing his book in the first place. In Vallee’s/Aubeck’s book, 25 of the 500 events were such transits. Transits are nice astronomical events as they are invariably recorded by excellent professional and amateur astronomers, and not by wild eyed nut jobs. Unfortunately, many transits can’t be verified, because they appear to be singular events. If caused by orbiting, passive celestial objects, they should be reoccurring at predictable intervals, but these 25 were not reoccurring.

Almost all of the transits listed in the Vallee/Aubeck book were observed using a telescope. The telescope was invented in about 1608. Galileo first applied its use to look at the sun in 1609 and promptly found that sunspots were on the surface of the sun and were not transits. Sunspots had been seen numerous times before the invention of the telescope. However, most if not all transits have been observed after the invention of the telescope. The 25 transits in “Wonders of the Sky” account for 11% of the 227 odd celestial occurrences listed in this book seen after the telescope’s invention. The sun transit data from the book is as follows:

Sighting No. Listed in Book         Year

273                                                 1661
347                                                 1762
349                                                 1762
352                                                 1764
364                                                 1791
365                                                 1793
370                                                 1798
376                                                 1802
377                                                 1802
396                                                 1819
398                                                 1820
402                                                 1822
420                                                 1836
422                                                 1837
425                                                 1839
430                                                 1845
438                                                 1847
444                                                 1849
446                                                 1849
448                                                 1849
451                                                 1850
456                                                 1850
462                                                 1859
490                                                 1876
496                                                 1879
--                                                     1880 (from internet)
--                                                     1883 “ “
--                                                     1888 “ “
--                                                     1989 “ “

By simple visual inspection of the preceding dates, you can note that from 1661 to 1762, there were no unknown transits of the sun, at least recorded in the “Wonders of the Sky” book.

There are periods of time in history where almost no sunspots were observed. One such period was from 1645 to 1715 and is known as the Maunder Minimum. The coincidence of this period with the 100 year absence of unknown transits from 1661 to 1762 is very highly suggestive that many of the unknown transits outside of this period were sunspots, and not objects crossing in front of the sun. However, it is surprising that these unknown sun transits would be mistaken sunspots because most of these discoverers of these sightings were amateur and professional astronomers who undoubtedly knew about sunspots, even in the 1700s. Also mitigating the mistaken sunspot theory is that there was also a sunspot minimum period from roughly 1795 to 1830 known as the Dalton Minimum during which we see that there was no corresponding reduction in unknown transits. On the opposite side of the coin, there were no unknown transits recorded from 1888 to 1989 (internet search) and there were plenty of sunspots during that century, again showing that misidentification of sunspots did not occur then either. One last observation is needed here: Most of these transits were observed as one time events on one day. The sun rotates once every 27 days, so a sunspot could take as long as 13.5 days to get from one side to the other. Some sunspots last only a few hours, but others can last as long as 6 months. This means an astronomer could see some sunspots over a several day period on average, and not just for a single day event. Therefore, all in all, these transits were probably not sunspots. Then what were they?

Well, they could be astronomer errors. We all remember the astronomer who “saw” all those canals on Mars. Another explanation that I saw was that they were “weak comets”. What is a weak comet? I can only guess that it is either a captured comet in orbit around the sun or it is one that has come in from space so many times on its elliptical orbit that it no longer can outgas like it used to. The average comet is about 6 miles diameter. We are talking about earth sized UFOs here, and the earth is 8000 miles diameter. A comet would have to outgas a lot to expand its apparent size to earth size, but a “weak” comet which has expended its volatile gaseous material load would not present a visual close to earth size. (Of course, a captured comet would have expended its gaseous material content early in its captured revolutions around the sun, so that would not be the explanation either.)

Around 1860, it was theorized that there was a planet even closer to the sun than Mercury, and it was given the name Vulcan. That is why I am calling these apparent huge UFOs near the sun “Vulcan UFOs”. The planet Vulcan was invented not because of these transit sightings, but because of variations in Mercury’s orbit thought to be due to Vulcan’s gravitational effect. We now know that the perturbations of Mercury’s orbit were due to the Einstein-predicted bending of light rays as they pass near the sun. Therefore, as the reasoning goes, if all of Mercury’s orbit variations are now explained by light ray bending due to the sun’s gravitation, then there must be nothing of large mass between Mercury and the sun. But if there were earth sized UFOs near the sun, they might not gravitationally affect Mercury because as we know UFOs need not obey anything about the law of gravity.

There is another historical phenomenon in the solar system which also supports the Vulcan UFO theory. There have been many objects seen rotating around Venus as well, yet Venus is known to be moonless. There’s been so many that this Venusian satellite was given the name “Neith”. Once again, from “Wonders in the Sky”, the sightings are as follows:

Sighting No. Listed in Book                  Year

287                                                          1672
300                                                          1686
332                                                          1740
342                                                          1749
344                                                          1761
345                                                          1761
350                                                          1764
351                                                          1764
355                                                          1768
404                                                          1823

If the Vulcan UFOs were real, then why couldn’t one or more of them occasionally fly to Venus for some mission to be identified as its moon, Neith, on rare occasions?

The information contained in “Wonders in the Sky” adds a little more believability to the story of “Huge UFOs Near the Sun”. Maybe those monstrous Vulcan UFOs really are there. For sure, if they are there, NASA will be doing a better job of altering the data to show that they aren’t, and we won’t be getting much more proof from them one way or the other to answer this question. If any of these old transit sightings really are of those earth sized Vulcan UFOs near the sun, then we can take some comfort that over the last 350 years or more that they have been there, they have made no moves to interfere with us and our planet.

* (Dr.) Joseph B. Gurman, NASA STEREO Project Scientist responded to the images of giant UFOs near the Sun with the following technical explanation (reported January 21, 2010). Dr. Gurman wrote, "What you're seeing is the difference between "beacon mode" (near real-time, heavily compressed, binned [I believe 512 x 512 or smaller]) images and normal playback telemetry images (2048 x 2048 native mode, less heavily but still lossily compressed).
     On January 18, at 21:47 UT, the 'central data recorder' at DSN, that stores all the playback data from all the missions DSN supports, failed. A backup CDR took over, but apparently started working on data from January 10, instead of just the four previous hours, as designed. (The last I heard, the DSN engineers don't understand why, but it certainly sounds like a software issue.) For some reason, DSN is unable to reset a pointer and say, please start processing from this time instead of that time. So we, and all the other missions supported by DSN, are waiting for our playback data from January 18 and all following days. As soon as we get it, and the instrument teams have reformatted the telemetry into scientifically useful formats (that allow, for instance, making SECCHI EUVI data into images), we will post the images and other STEREO browse data in the normal places. And no, I don't know why DSN designed such an inflexible CDR system. I suspect they may modify it after this experience."