A British UFO hunter claims that the luminous orbs he spotted flying near the International Space Station (ISS) might be UFOs.
The UFO hunter, who goes only by the name Graham, found the orbs while watching a live feed from a camera onboard the ISS. He shared a clip featuring the orbs on June 3 on his Youtube channel Conspiracy Depot.
In the first few seconds of the clip, a bright, circular object could be seen hurtling at great speeds in the direction opposite to the ISS. After a while, a few more similar orbs could be seen flying past the space station. (Related: Stunning NASA clip may have captured a UFO slamming into the ISS.)
Graham said that the first orb appeared to be "perfectly spherical," similar to other unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – the intelligence community's preferred term for UFOs – that were documented on Earth.
"It's very bright, which could be due to some kind of mechanical lighting or even plasma," he said in his Youtube post. "And it's moving fast, but not as fast as your traditional satellite."
The footage showing the mysterious objects was taken just as the ISS was approaching the west coast of Chile. He said that the location was quite compelling because the country had a reputation for being a "UFO hotspot."
Mysterious aerial sightings in Chile purported to be UFOs
A number of unexplained aerial phenomena were recorded in Chile over the past few years. In 2014, two Chilean Navy officers spotted a mysterious aircraft hovering off the country's west coast. The pair followed the craft from 40 miles away and tried to communicate with it to no avail. They lost the object when they had to fly back to their base.
One of the officers described the object as a "flat, elongated structure" while the other said it was "white with a semi-oval shape on the horizontal axis." The second officer added that the object discharged some gas or liquid with a high thermal signal.
The Chilean government released a ten-minute video of the UFO sighting, which was taken from the same helicopter carrying the two eyewitnesses. There was speculation that the object was either a piece of space debris – any remnant of decommissioned spacecraft or satellites – or a medium-haul aircraft trying to land in Chile, but these were disputed by many experts.
Chilean scientists pointed out that no space debris entered the atmosphere on the same day in the same location. And in any case a piece of space junk would have fallen rapidly and not flown horizontally, as the unidentified object in question did.
Others noted that if the craft were a conventional airplane seeking to make a landing, it would have sought clearance to land and would have responded to the Navy officers when they attempted to make contact.
In 2019, several bright fireballs streaked across the sky in the island of Chiloe in southern Chile. The fireballs were initially thought to be meteorites from space, but Chile's National Geology and Mining Service later said that the objects were not dissolved meteorites. Geologists with the agency visited the impact site and found no evidence of meteorites or any other object that might have fallen from outer space.
Some experts suggested that the fireballs might have been pieces of space debris that fell back down to Earth after their orbits decayed. This wouldn't have been the first time this happened. In 2018, for example, a booster from a Chinese rocket tumbled back down to the planet and exploded upon contact in Guangxi, China.
But astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said that this was unlikely because he did not see any relevant space debris candidates that could have caused the event.
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