I recently came across the YouTube segment below that debunked the famous “Tether UFOs” allegedly caught on film by NASA. Back at one of the Ancient of Days UFO conferences (I think it was 2003) at which I spoke, another presenter, David Sereda, touted this video as absolute proof of intelligent extraterrestrial craft in earth’s orbit. David and Dan Aykroyd had collaborated on a video project (that I presume sold well) focusing on the STS-75 Shuttle mission and this video. Turns out it isn’t a video of extraterrestrial UFOs at all (I’ll pause while you catch your breath).

I remember suspecting that something was amiss in this video the first time I saw it. It made little sense to me that any camera could capture an object that was less than the circumference of my pinky at a distance of miles away, but David had a lot of physics mumbo-jumbo in its defense. I went back home to Madison and showed the video to a friend of mine who was a PhD student in electrical engineering (who also happened to have worked on the radar used in the famous Mexico “UFOs on radar” incident — they weren’t alien craft, either). At any rate, my friend, Daniel Rodriguez, tore apart the claims offered by Sereda for the STS-75 video using lots of electrical-engineering-speak which I didn’t understand either (but did appreciate). This YouTube video confirms that the Tether incident video was an optical illusion — the fellow on the video replicates the incident rather nicely. I kept waiting for Bill Birnes to just burst in and accuse the guy of being on the government dole. Bill can turn a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into evidence for aliens. But alas, the segment doesn’t include Bill’s reaction.